Sydney might be proud and vain but his statement of relevance here was not due to that. Scientists are supposed to constantly try and indemnify what’s hard and important and pursue those fields. He said that statement because back then he believed the important fields to explore were developmental biology and neuroscience. More recently he wrote an editorial suggesting how a field like connectomics would be the equivalent new, exciting, important field would be.

The celebration of mediocrity with Nobels for no real reason except probably politics (I sat near to the Nobel cabals in lectures these candidate prize winners will come give talks at) isn’t in the interest of science or progress is all.