Science & Tech Quote by John Charles Polanyi

Polanyi’s line lands like a quiet reprimand, the kind only a veteran of the lab and the grant cycle can deliver. He frames the anxiety of “young people” not as abstract worry about progress, but as a practical question of belonging: where can a scientist actually build a life? The pivot from “passport” to “rely on” is doing the heavy lifting. Citizenship, he implies, is paperwork; seriousness about science is infrastructure - funding, mentorship, institutional patience, and the cultural permission to fail in the service of discovering something true.

The subtext is a warning about brain drain without ever using the phrase. These young scientists aren’t plotting an identity switch so much as searching for a patron. Polanyi makes their calculation sound unromantic and inevitable: talent follows support. By stressing “support and encouragement,” he widens the critique beyond budgets. A country can bankroll research and still communicate contempt for expertise, treat curiosity as elitism, or demand immediate payoff from work that only yields results on a decadal clock.

Context matters because Polanyi isn’t a pundit auditioning for outrage; he’s a Nobel-winning chemist speaking from a lifetime inside the machinery of national science. That gives the quote its moral authority and its sting. It’s not just “invest in STEM.” It’s a challenge to national self-image: if the next generation doubts your seriousness, they’re already imagining their future somewhere else - not for glamour, but for oxygen.