Pioneering Biochemist Erwin Chargaff on the Poetics of Curiosity, the Crucial Difference Between Understanding and Explanation, and What Makes a Scientist

This is the sort of curiosity that is edge driven, not only learning what and how things belong, but also building heretofore unimaginable lines of belonging. It is inquisitiveness untethered to acquisition.

“He fought against the problems from which others fled. He loved discovering the relations between multiple aspects of nature, but what drove his search was joy, the pleasure an artist feels, the vertigo of the visionary capable of discerning the threads that weave the fabric of the future,”

What they had in common, however—to an uncanny degree—was a curiosity that could only be described as gleeful, imbuing everything they said with an infectious energy. They asked probing questions about complex subjects without hesitation or even a hint of self-consciousness, as if the answers to life’s deepest mysteries were never more than a conve