Sample Thank You Speech

Respected members of the jury and authorities present; colleagues from the scientific academy; loved ones present, general public. Thank you all for being here and accompanying me to receive this immense honor, which is the National Science Award.

In his famous study of the origin of species and the natural selection, that institution of biology that today is Charles Darwin explained that it is not the strongest nor the most intelligent of the species the one that survives, but the one that best knows how to adapt to the changes. And that phrase, which today any high school student is able to explain in Sciences, at the time changed the way we understand history and time itself. A phrase, moreover, with which I stumbled upon many years ago, when the mystery of life began to reap its head in mine and I did not have the slightest suspicion that one day I would be here, in front of you, celebrating the discovery of new and unsuspected fossil forms of life.

Fossils, as is known, are the petrified remains of those species that, according to Darwin, do not knew or could not adapt to a new natural environment, and they came face to face with the train of the extinction. They are the trace in time of the losers, if you will, but also a

metaphor of what I felt for a long time when I studied the fossils of primitive rodents in the Museum National, and I wondered why no one had noticed the obvious differences between the marsupials of the Cenozoic.

There was a hole there that no one was willing to recognize, because it forced us to rethink what we had hitherto taken for granted regarding the origin of the mammals and of the human being himself. And faced with such a prospect, the most brilliant scientific minds preferred caution, silence, waiting. But in science, as in life, adaptation to change is key to survival, and lo and behold, many years after I was encouraged to Contrary to them, we have finally been able to show that the hole exists, and that we must begin to rethink what we already took for granted.

It is this critical spirit, and above all self-criticism, that allowed modern science to answer our old questions. And it is to that same critical spirit, and to its founding fathers, like Copernicus and Galileo, like Francis Bacon and William Gilbert, that I would like tonight. dedicate this award, but not without first thanking my students deeply, who taught me to keep alive the flame of curiosity and irreverence; to my colleagues González and Iñárritu, always ready to offer me a different point of view; and above all to my family, who have endured my obsession with primitive life for decades of love.

Thank you all. Good evening.