Science Quote by Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

A Nobel-winning biochemist reduces the romance of discovery to a shopping list, then slips the knife in on item four. Szent-Gyorgyi’s line works because it starts like a scientist’s tidy taxonomy - brains, eyes, machines - and ends like a budget meeting. The rhythm is almost pedagogical: three noble instruments of inquiry, then the blunt admission that inquiry is also an economic activity. The comma before “and, fourth” lands like a pause for uncomfortable recognition.

The intent isn’t to sneer at science; it’s to puncture the myth that research runs on pure intellect and curiosity. “Brains” and “eyes” gesture toward the human core: imagination, judgment, and the trained capacity to notice what others miss. “Machines” acknowledges the 20th century turn in science, when measurement and instrumentation became not just helpful but constitutive - new tools didn’t merely confirm theories; they created new questions by making new phenomena visible.

Then “money” arrives as the hidden variable everyone pretends isn’t in the equation. Subtext: without funding, the smartest mind and the sharpest observation stay anecdotal; without capital, even the best lab becomes a thought experiment. Coming from someone who worked through an era of rapidly expanding state, military, and industrial science, it reads as both realism and warning. The line is a compact reminder that what gets studied is inseparable from who pays - and that “objectivity” often rides on very unromantic, very political infrastructure.