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Opinion
Nature 416, 247 (21 March 2002) | doi:10.1038/416247a
Pursuing arrogant simplicities
Abstract
Multidisciplinary research in biology requires the patience to distinguish untutored crassness from deceptively simple insights, and awareness from all participants of just how complex is even the simplest life-form.
Commenting on the impact of physicists on biology after the Second World War, the physicist-turned-biologist Leo Szilard said: "What physicists brought to biology is not any skills acquired in physics, but rather an attitude: the conviction that few biologists had at that time, that mysteries can be solved." Physicists always tend to start simple.
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