It seems likely that most if not all the genetic information in any organism is carried by nucleic acid – usually by DNA, although certain small viruses use RNA as their genetic material.
FRANCIS CRICKIt is notoriously difficult to define the word living.
More Francis Crick Quotes
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It is one of the more striking generalizations of biochemistry – which surprisingly is hardly ever mentioned in the biochemical textbooks – that the twenty amino acids and the four bases, are, with minor reservations, the same throughout Nature.
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One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.
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When you start in science, you are brainwashed into believing how careful you must be, and how difficult it is to discover things. There’s something that might be called the ‘graduate student syndrome’; graduate students hardly believe they can make a discovery.
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Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children.
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The balance of evidence both from the cell-free system and from the study of mutation, suggests that this does not occur at random, and that triplets coding the same amino acid may well be rather similar.
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Avoid the temptation to work so hard that there is no time left for serious thinking.
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A final proof of our ideas can only be obtained by detailed studies on the alterations produced in the amino acid sequence of a protein by mutations of the type discussed here.
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A comparison between the triplets tentatively deduced by these methods with the changes in amino acid sequence produced by mutation shows a fair measure of agreement.
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In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy.
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You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.
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My own prejudices are exactly the opposite of the functionalists’: “If you want to understand function, study structure”.
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It has yet to be shown by direct biochemical methods, as opposed to the indirect genetic evidence mentioned earlier, that the code is indeed a triplet code.
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Again the message to experimentalists is: Be sensible but don’t be impressed too much by negative arguments. If at all possible, try it and see what turns up. Theorists almost always dislike this sort of approach.
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An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.
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Anybody who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help.
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We are sometimes asked what the result would be if we put four +’s in one gene. To answer this my colleagues have recently put together not merely four but six +’s.
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Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice.
FRANCIS CRICK -
A busy life is a wasted life.
FRANCIS CRICK -
If the code does indeed have some logical foundation then it is legitimate to consider all the evidence, both good and bad, in any attempt to deduce it.
FRANCIS CRICK -
The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.
FRANCIS CRICK -
A man who is right every time is not likely to do very much.
FRANCIS CRICK -
A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong.
FRANCIS CRICK -
There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.
FRANCIS CRICK -
Exact knowledge is the enemy of vitalism.
FRANCIS CRICK -
God is a hacker, not an engineer.
FRANCIS CRICK -
How is the base sequence, divided into codons? There is nothing in the backbone of the nucleic acid, which is perfectly regular, to show us how to group the bases into codons.
FRANCIS CRICK