If I had been married earlier in life, I wouldn’t have seen the double helix. I would have been taking care of the kids on Saturday. On the other hand, I was lonely a lot of the time.
JAMES WATSONScience that leads over the horizon depends on gathering the best minds and enabling them to do what the best minds naturally seek to do: pursue the most thrilling questions of the time.
More James Watson Quotes
-
-
No one may have the guts to say this, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn’t we?
JAMES WATSON -
You’ve never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient.
JAMES WATSON -
Ultimately, we’ll help the people we discriminate against if we try to understand more about them; genetics will lead to a world where there is a sympathy for the underdog.
JAMES WATSON -
Some think there is something wrong about enhancing people.
JAMES WATSON -
One of the greatest gifts science has brought to the world is continuing elimination of the supernatural.
JAMES WATSON -
If scientists don’t play God, who will?
JAMES WATSON -
Never be the brightest person in the room.
JAMES WATSON -
Ever since we achieved a breakthrough in the area of recombinant DNA in 1973, left-wing nuts and environmental kooks have been screaming that we will create some kind of Frankenstein bug or Andromeda Strain that will destroy us all.
JAMES WATSON -
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.
JAMES WATSON -
Science moves with the spirit of an adventure characterized both by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty.
JAMES WATSON -
The pace of discovery is going unbelievably fast.
JAMES WATSON -
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.
JAMES WATSON -
If you succeed with your first dream, it helps. You know, people trust you, possibly, for the second one. They give you a chance to play out your second one.
JAMES WATSON -
One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.
JAMES WATSON -
[As a young man ] I came to the conclusion that the church was just a bunch of fascists that supported Franco. I stopped going on Sunday mornings and watched the birds with my father instead.
JAMES WATSON






