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.
FRANCIS CRICKFor 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.
More Francis Crick Quotes
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Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice.
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There is no scientific study more vital to man than the study of his own brain. Our entire view of the universe depends on it.
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Chance is the only source of true novelty.
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It is notoriously difficult to define the word living.
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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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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.
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Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children.
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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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There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.
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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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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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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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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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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.
FRANCIS CRICK