Chance is the only source of true novelty.
FRANCIS CRICKRather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick.
More Francis Crick Quotes
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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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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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Again the message to experimentalists is: Be sensible but don’t be impressed too much by negative arguments. If at all possible, try it and see what turns up. Theorists almost always dislike this sort of approach.
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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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A comparison between the triplets tentatively deduced by these methods with the changes in amino acid sequence produced by mutation shows a fair measure of agreement.
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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.
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One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.
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Exact knowledge is the enemy of vitalism.
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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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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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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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A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong.
FRANCIS CRICK -
Avoid the temptation to work so hard that there is no time left for serious thinking.
FRANCIS CRICK -
Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick.
FRANCIS CRICK -
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.
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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.
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God is a hacker, not an engineer.
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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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A man who is right every time is not likely to do very much.
FRANCIS CRICK -
Free will is located in or near the anterior cingulate sulcus.
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Evolution is cleverer than you are.
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We have to take away from humans in the long run their reproductive autonomy as the only way to guarantee the advancement of mankind.
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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.
FRANCIS CRICK -
A knowledge of the true age of the Earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do.
FRANCIS CRICK -
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 -
If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong.
FRANCIS CRICK