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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.

Francis Crick

It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.
FRANCIS CRICK

Brain Complication Detail Essential Place See Understand Universe
Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick.
FRANCIS CRICK

Believe Myself Structure
Trying to determine the structure of a protein by UV spectroscopy was like trying to determine the structure of a piano by listening to the sound it made while being dropped down a flight of stairs.
FRANCIS CRICK

Determination Listen Sound Structure Try
Evolution is cleverer than you are.
FRANCIS CRICK

Clever Evolution Yourself
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

Bad Evidence Foundation Goodness Legal Logic
It now seems very likely that many of the 64 triplets, possibly most of them, may code one amino acid or another, and that in general several distinct triplets may code one amino acid.
FRANCIS CRICK

Biology Born Possible Reproduction Science
The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.
FRANCIS CRICK

Biology Chemistry Explanation Fact Modern Movement
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.
FRANCIS CRICK

Detail Evidence Ideas Ourselves Science Type
We have to take away from humans in the long run their reproductive autonomy as the only way to guarantee the advancement of mankind.
FRANCIS CRICK

Human Kind Man Reproduction Run
Exploratory research is really like working in a fog. You don’t know where you’re going. You’re just groping. Then people learn about it afterwards and think how straightforward it was.
FRANCIS CRICK

Education Learning People Research Work
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.
FRANCIS CRICK

Generation Hard Nature Strike
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.
FRANCIS CRICK

Honesty Knowledge Life Man Miracle Satisfaction State
Chance is the only source of true novelty.
FRANCIS CRICK

Chance Novel True
I also suspect that many workers in this field [molecular biology] and related fields have been strongly motivated by the desire, rarely actually expressed, to refute vitalism.
FRANCIS CRICK

Expression Motivational Myself Strong Work
Exact knowledge is the enemy of vitalism.
FRANCIS CRICK

Enemy Knowledge One Liner
A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong.
FRANCIS CRICK

Explanation Fact Theory Wrong

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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