“Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.”

You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.

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.

It seems likely that most if not all the genetic information in any organism is carried by nucleic acid – usually by DNA, although certain small viruses use RNA as their genetic material.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.

It is not easy to convey, unless one has experienced it, the dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clinches into place.

Protein synthesis is a central problem for the whole of biology, and that it is in all probability closely related to gene action.

Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice.

A good scientist values criticism almost higher than friendship: no, in science criticism is the height and measure of friendship.

Avoid the temptation to work so hard that there is no time left for serious thinking.

Anybody who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help.

God is a hacker, not an engineer.

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.

Botany is based on fixed genera.

The muscles used to make a smile actually send a biochemical message to our nervous system that it is safe to relax the flight of freeze response.

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.

Protein synthesis is a central problem for the whole of biology, and that it is in all probability closely related to gene action.

We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.

We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.

The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. The brain boggles the mind.

I turned against the left wing because they don’t like genetics, because genetics implies that sometimes in life we fail because we have bad genes. They want all failure in life to be due to the evil system.