Time & Perspective Quote by Aaron Klug

Klug is making a quiet, almost defiant case for slow science in a culture that keeps trying to turn discovery into a quarterly report. The phrase "moderately large investment" is classic laboratory understatement: he’s talking about budgets, yes, but also about institutional patience, the kind that can bankroll failures, dead ends, and years of work that produce nothing publishable until they suddenly change a field. By pairing "technological and theoretical developments", he refuses the false split between building better instruments and building better ideas. In his world, the microscope and the model co-evolve; breakthroughs arrive when theory can finally interpret what technology can finally reveal.

The key pressure point is the last clause: "without the pressure to achieve quick or short term results". It’s less a gentle preference than a warning about what pressure does to research. When funding and prestige hinge on speed, labs optimize for incremental, defensible outputs: safe hypotheses, fashionable topics, results that can be packaged. Klug is arguing that the most consequential work often looks wasteful right up until it isn’t - and that demanding immediacy doesn’t just slow progress, it bends it toward the trivial.

Contextually, this reads like a veteran of big, infrastructure-heavy science - the postwar ecosystem of national labs, philanthropies, and research councils that made long-horizon bets possible. It also anticipates today’s churn: grant cycles, metrics, and "innovation" rhetoric that treats time itself as an inefficiency. Klug’s intent is to protect the conditions that let science be genuinely surprising.