“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.”

You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.

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.

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.

If, for example, all the codons are triplets, then in addition to the correct reading of the message, there are two incorrect readings which we shall obtain if we do not start the grouping into sets of three at the right place.

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.

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.

It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.

It is not easy to convey, unless one has experienced it, the dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clinches into place.

Protein synthesis is a central problem for the whole of biology, and that it is in all probability closely related to gene action.

Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice.

A good scientist values criticism almost higher than friendship: no, in science criticism is the height and measure of friendship.

Avoid the temptation to work so hard that there is no time left for serious thinking.

Anybody who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help.

God is a hacker, not an engineer.

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.

Almost all aspects of life are engineered at the molecular level, and without understanding molecules we can only have a very sketchy understanding of life itself.

The younger generation is supposed to rage against the machine, not for it. They’re supposed to question authority, not question those who question authority.

It’s very easy to leave when things go wrong, but to stick around and to basically give life to a town because of everything that it gave you generation after generation after generation, that to me is what defines a true American.

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

There’s no democratic state that’s not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery.

I believe the history of American music is just as important as anything political because it’s changed generations of people.

The future is not a gift: it is an achievement. Every generation helps make its own future. This is the essential challenge of the present.

I’m a fighting man, a fighting man with generations of fighting men before me in my family. That’s all we do: we fight.

I feel like as a generation, we sell ourselves short. I just expected more from us.