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 CRICKIn my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy.
More Francis Crick Quotes
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Protein synthesis is a central problem for the whole of biology, and that it is in all probability closely related to gene action.
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Anybody who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help.
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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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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.
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Evolution is cleverer than you are.
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There is no scientific study more vital to man than the study of his own brain. Our entire view of the universe depends on it.
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The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it.
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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.
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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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My own prejudices are exactly the opposite of the functionalists’: “If you want to understand function, study structure”.
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A good scientist values criticism almost higher than friendship: no, in science criticism is the height and measure of friendship.
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It would appear that the number of nonsense triplets is rather low, since we only occasionally come across them. However this conclusion is less secure than our other deductions about the general nature of the genetic code.
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The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.
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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.
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A man who is right every time is not likely to do very much.
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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.
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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.
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It is notoriously difficult to define the word living.
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It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.
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Free will is located in or near the anterior cingulate sulcus.
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If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong.
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Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick.
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God is a hacker, not an engineer.
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A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong.
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For simplicity one can think of the + class as having one extra base at some point or other in the genetic message and the – class as having one too few.
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You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.
FRANCIS CRICK