“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.”

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.

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.

Evolution is cleverer than you are.

A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong.

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.

The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.

If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong.

In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy and especially dislike reading experimental papers. He seemed to have very strong biological intuitions but unfortunately of negative sign.

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.

A man who is right every time is not likely to do very much.

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.

Free will is located in or near the anterior cingulate sulcus.

In the fullness of time, educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death.

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.

My own prejudices are exactly the opposite of the functionalists’: “If you want to understand function, study structure”.

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.