© 1999 Robert A. Freitas Jr. All Rights Reserved.

Robert A. Freitas Jr., Nanomedicine, Volume I: Basic Capabilities, Landes Bioscience, Georgetown, TX, 1999

Opening Quotations

No new findings will ever be made if we rest content with the findings of the past. Besides, a man who follows someone else not only doesn't find anything, he is not even looking. "But surely you are going to walk in your predecessors' footsteps?" Yes indeed, I shall use the old road, but if I find a shorter and easier one I shall open it up. The men who pioneered the old routes are leaders, not our masters. Truth lies open to everyone. There has yet to be a monopoly of truth. And there is plenty of it left for future generations too.

- Seneca, the Younger (4 BC - 65 AD)

We are like children standing on the shoulders of a giant, for we can see all that the giant can see, and a little more.

-Guy de Chauliac, Chirurgia Magna, 1362

The human mind is often so awkward and ill-regulated in the career of invention that it is at first diffident, and then despises itself. For it appears at first incredible that any such discovery should be made, and when it has been made, it appears incredible that it should so long have escaped men's research. All which affords good reason for the hope that a vast mass of inventions yet remains, which may be deduced not only from the investigation of new modes of operation, but also from transferring, comparing, and applying these already known, by the method of what we have termed literate experience.

- Francis Bacon, Novum Organum: Aphorisms on the Interpretation of Nature and the Empire of Man, 1620

Last updated on 16 February 2003