Of Mice and Men

Bruce Ames Interview

Virginia Postrel from the November 1994 issue

(Page 7 of 7)

Ames: A lot of scientific research is unimaginative. But that's part of the nature of it. It's hard to know beforehand. If you could weed out all the research that would never lead anywhere, then we would know everything before we started. It's a discovery process and you don't know where everything is going to go. People who are doing the research always think, Ah, that's an important experiment.

Reason: Do you ever worry that your critics are right and you're wrong and you account for cancer deaths by making these arguments?

Ames: All the time. I mean a good scientist is always thinking, where could I have gone wrong? So I m always kicking all my assumptions and one of the reasons why I'm successful is I'm always challenging assumptions. If there's a paradigm around and somehow too many uncomfortable facts start coming up, then you say, Ah, how do I knock it down? What's better? So one's always doing that. But I'm as sure of these ideas as anything I've ever done in science.

Reason: Thank you.