Science Quote by Paul Nurse

Restlessness dressed up as practicality: that is the sly engine of Paul Nurse's line. On the surface he is offering a tidy, almost logistical rationale for leaving Edinburgh - intellectual cross-pollination plus a complaint about the weather. The phrasing "not advisable" is telling. It isn't "I wanted to" or "I was unhappy"; it's the language of risk management, the voice of someone trained to treat life choices like experimental design. In a scientist's mouth, "possibility" and "not advisable" signal hypothesis and protocol, a career narrated with the same cautious conditionality you would use around data.

The winter detail does more than set a scene. "Long dark winters" is a literal climate note, but it also works as a shorthand for the emotional atmosphere of early-career research: isolation, repetition, the grind of proving yourself inside one lab culture. Nurse doesn't melodramatize it - "rather dismal" is almost comically restrained - and that restraint is the point. Scientists are socialized to understate. By minimizing the misery, he makes it feel more credible, like an aside that slipped past his internal peer review.

Contextually, it's a compact defense of mobility as ambition without arrogance. Academia rewards the myth of the single-minded devotee who never looks up from the bench; Nurse quietly punctures that by admitting environment matters. Discovery isn't just brilliance. It's geography, mentorship, and yes, daylight.