Take young researchers, put them together in virtual seclusion, give them an unprecedented degree of freedom and turn up the pressure by fostering competitiveness.
JAMES WATSONWe’re not all equal, it’s simply not true. That isn’t science.
More James Watson Quotes
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There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.
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If I had been married earlier in life, I wouldn’t have seen the double helix. I would have been taking care of the kids on Saturday. On the other hand, I was lonely a lot of the time.
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It’s necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant.
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I have been much blessed.
JAMES WATSON -
One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.
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A goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.
JAMES WATSON -
One of the greatest gifts science has brought to the world is continuing elimination of the supernatural.
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Ultimately, we’ll help the people we discriminate against if we try to understand more about them; genetics will lead to a world where there is a sympathy for the underdog.
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For all my life, America was the place to be. And we somehow continue to be the place where there are real opportunities to change the world for the better.
JAMES WATSON -
You’ve never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient.
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Science moves with the spirit of an adventure characterized both by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty.
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Do things as soon as you can. If a decision needs to be made, make it. It gives you more time to change your mind.
JAMES WATSON -
No one may have the guts to say this, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn’t we?
JAMES WATSON -
[As a young man ] I came to the conclusion that the church was just a bunch of fascists that supported Franco. I stopped going on Sunday mornings and watched the birds with my father instead.
JAMES WATSON -
DNA was my only gold rush. I regarded DNA as worth a gold rush.
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If scientists don’t play God, who will?
JAMES WATSON -
Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.
JAMES WATSON -
We’re not all equal, it’s simply not true. That isn’t science.
JAMES WATSON -
Moving forward will not be for the faint of heart. But if the next century witnesses failure, let it be because our science is not yet up to the job, not because we don’t have the courage to make less random the sometimes most unfair courses of human evolution.
JAMES WATSON -
Science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders. Instead, its steps forward (and sometimes backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles.
JAMES WATSON -
Ever since we achieved a breakthrough in the area of recombinant DNA in 1973, left-wing nuts and environmental kooks have been screaming that we will create some kind of Frankenstein bug or Andromeda Strain that will destroy us all.
JAMES WATSON -
Science that leads over the horizon depends on gathering the best minds and enabling them to do what the best minds naturally seek to do: pursue the most thrilling questions of the time.
JAMES WATSON -
I turned against the left wing because they don’t like genetics, because genetics implies that sometimes in life we fail because we have bad genes. They want all failure in life to be due to the evil system.
JAMES WATSON -
The American public is being sold a very nasty bill of goods about cancer.
JAMES WATSON -
I think the reason people are dealing with science less well now than 50 years ago is that it has become so complicated.
JAMES WATSON -
The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. The brain boggles the mind.
JAMES WATSON