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.
FRANCIS CRICKIf 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.
More Francis Crick Quotes
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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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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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Chance is the only source of true novelty.
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Free will is located in or near the anterior cingulate sulcus.
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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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Exact knowledge is the enemy of vitalism.
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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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A good scientist values criticism almost higher than friendship: no, in science criticism is the height and measure of friendship.
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If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong.
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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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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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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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You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.
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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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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.
FRANCIS CRICK