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 CRICKHow 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.
More Francis Crick Quotes
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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.
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If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong.
FRANCIS CRICK -
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.
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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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You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.
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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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Chance is the only source of true novelty.
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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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It is notoriously difficult to define the word living.
FRANCIS CRICK -
A good scientist values criticism almost higher than friendship: no, in science criticism is the height and measure of friendship.
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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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The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.
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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.
FRANCIS CRICK