There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.
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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A good scientist values criticism almost higher than friendship: no, in science criticism is the height and measure of friendship.
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A busy life is a wasted life.
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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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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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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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The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it.
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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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Evolution is cleverer than you are.
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Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.
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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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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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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.
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In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy.
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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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Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice.
FRANCIS CRICK