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Hans Lissmann
(30 Apr 1909 - 21 Apr 1995)
Ukrainian-British zoologist who conducted pioneering experiments on animal locomotion. He investigated the electric sense of fishes. Although he was born in the Ukraine, by age 11 his family had migrated to Germany, where he got his university education and began his scientific career, which he continued from 1934 at the University of Cambridge, England.
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Science Quotes by Hans Lissmann (2 quotes)
In … biological research one must resist the temptation to be deflected by details, to follow the fashion of putting the [dissection] pieces too early under the electron microscope. The magnitude of a scientific revelation is not always paralleled by the degree of magnification employed. It is easier to select the points on which attention should be concentrated once the plan is understood.
— Hans Lissmann
In 'Electric Location by Fishes', Scientific American (Mar 1963), 208, No. 3, 50.
To a man of an impatient disposition, like James Gray, it became clear that in view of the very large number of known species many more generations of scientists could be kept occupied as sedate, taxonomic filing clerks by painstaking description and comparison of structures. This sort of existence was not for him; it lacked the excitement of discovery, and was not likely to make the principles or mechanisms underlying the process of evolution any more plausible.
— Hans Lissmann
In obituary, 'James Gray, 14 October 1891 - 14 December 1975', Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society (1 Nov 1978), 24.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
