Avoid the temptation to work so hard that there is no time left for serious thinking.
FRANCIS CRICKAlmost 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.
More Francis Crick Quotes
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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.
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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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A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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Evolution is cleverer than you are.
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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.
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You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.
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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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Anybody who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help.
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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.
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If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong.
FRANCIS CRICK