The quote is mostly tongue-in-cheek, but it does occasionally come up as a real issue. I have an anecdote on it: A former fellow grad student was expressing th

The quote is mostly tongue-in-cheek, but it does occasionally come up as a real issue. I have an anecdote on it: A former fellow grad student was expressing their dis-belief that though there was a lot of work done in the brain with electrical signals, there is effectively no work done on measuring the magnetic properties of the brain or neurons. The much older and much more esteemed PI that was also present simply shut the student down, to the point of telling them to 'shut up'. "There are no magnetic fields in the brain", I think was the quote. The student, misunderstanding the situation, pressed onward and challenged the PI on fMRI and the like. The discussion turned into a 1-sided argument where the PI basically told the student that they were an idiot and that things like fMRI were useless (actually a debatable point at the time, re: the dead salmon experiments). I'll say I never quite trusted PIs after that dressing-down, they seem to be more concerned about their mortgages than their legacies.