For years, I had no time for exploratory travel.

You travel across the country, you visit departments, you give talks, you talk about the work at your laboratory - what's going on, what the opportunities are there - you talk about your own research.

I was strongly encouraged by a science teacher who took an interest in me and presented me with a key to the laboratory to allow me to work whenever I wanted.

If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.

My black hero is and always will be Martin Luther King, not just because of the strength of his oratory but because his vision was very much the reality that I'd come to take for granted.

I wound up getting offered a job at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory where I invented a power supply mechanism for the Galileo space craft which was in orbit around Jupiter until 2003.

The International Space Station is a phenomenal laboratory, an unparalleled test bed for new invention and discovery. Yet I often thought, while silently gazing out the window at Earth, that the actual legacy of humanity's attempts to step into space will be a better understanding of our current planet and how to take care of it.

I have a lot of respect for Martin Luther King. I think he was one of the greatest orators that the country ever produced.

Our laboratory is a place that celebrates diversity and is totally open to all differences, not just sex but also age, ethnicity, religion and other traditions.

When grand plans for scientific and defence technologies are made, do the people in power think about the sacrifices the people in the laboratories and fields have to make?

I consider nature a vast chemical laboratory in which all kinds of composition and decompositions are formed.

In preparation for a career in academic medicine, I worked as a medical house officer at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital from 1966 to 1968 and then joined Ira Pastan's laboratory at the National Institutes of Health as a Clinical Associate.

Here at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, we have genetically rearranged various viruses and bacteria as part of our medical research. In fact, we have been able to create entirely new types of DNA molecules by splicing together the genetic information from different organisms - recombinant DNA.

Now a cholera epidemic was sweeping through Southeast Asia and south Asia in the early 1970s, so I started medical school and I joined a laboratory to work on this.

In the Radiation Laboratory we count it a privilege to do everything we can to assist our medical colleagues in the application of these new tools to the problems of human suffering.

I set up a laboratory in the Department of Physiology in the Medical School in South Africa and begin to try to find a bacteriophage system which we might use to solve the genetic code.

The space station is the most unique laboratory we've ever built. The reason we have it is to do research on materials, people, medical matters, pharmaceuticals - the possibilities are nearly endless.

I think a moratorium probably is legal, and we should probably for a short period of time impose a moratorium so that we don't permit any additional landfill permits for the time being, so we don't exacerbate the problem.

I think that's something a scientist can do because a scientist works at a border, at the edge of science, at the edge of knowledge, and so there's a lot of fun of reaching out and thinking about things that other people didn't think about. And so it has a kind of exploratory notion, kind of adventurous part in it.

It's my job to know what's available from every retailer, catalog, website, antiques mall, and craftsperson. A good designer or decorator has to have an almost encyclopedic knowledge.

The Intelligence Committee will also examine present counterintelligence programs for the Department of Energy, the National Laboratories, and the Department of Defense.

Barack Obama is probably one of the brightest in terms of sheer intelligence... also probably the best orator we've ever had as a president.

I deeply adored my mum. She was an extraordinary person, even for the prejudice I'm likely to have. She was beautiful, amusing, a tremendous elaborator of things into comic proportions and extravagant in her imagination.

Put off your imagination, as you put off your overcoat, when you enter the laboratory. Put it on again, as you put on your overcoat, when you leave.