Marriage Quote by George Porter

A Nobel-night thank-you is supposed to sound effortless, but Porter’s sentence carries the grain of a lab bench: careful, qualifying, a little defensive, deeply revealing. He thanks “all those who have shared my work,” a phrase that widens credit beyond the lone-genius myth without quite surrendering authorship. “Shared” is doing quiet political labor here. In big-science Britain, where teams, institutions, and funding bodies orbit a discovery, you acknowledge the collective without letting the achievement dissolve into committee minutes.

Then comes the line that sharpens the human cost: “the debt that I owe to my wife.” Not love, not sacrifice, not the sentimental bouquet. Debt. It frames marriage as an economy of time and permission, and it’s startlingly candid about the bargain that research demands. The subtext isn’t just gratitude; it’s an admission that the career was underwritten at home.

The most charged clause is also the most polite: her “encouragement to put research before all other things.” That’s a socially acceptable way to say: I was absent, single-minded, maybe difficult; she normalized it. In the postwar culture of scientific heroism - when laboratories were cast as engines of national progress - “before all other things” reads like devotion and indictment at once. Porter turns a public coronation into a small ethical footnote: discovery doesn’t merely happen, it is chosen, and someone else often pays the opportunity cost.