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 WATSONScience 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.
More James Watson Quotes
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Science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders. Instead, its steps forward (and sometimes backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles.
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Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.
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Our goal should be to understand our differences.
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For all my life, America was the place to be. And we somehow continue to be the place where there are real opportunities to change the world for the better.
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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?
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Some think there is something wrong about enhancing people.
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A clone of Einstein wouldn’t be stupid, but he wouldn’t necessarily be any genius, either.
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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.
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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.
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The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn’t believe in God, and so he had no hang-ups about souls.
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No good model ever accounted for all the facts, since some data was bound to be misleading if not plain wrong.
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The American public is being sold a very nasty bill of goods about cancer.
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Take young researchers, put them together in virtual seclusion, give them an unprecedented degree of freedom and turn up the pressure by fostering competitiveness.
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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.
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[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.
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It’s necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant.
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I never dreamed that in my lifetime my own genome would be sequenced.
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DNA was my only gold rush. I regarded DNA as worth a gold rush.
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I think the reason people are dealing with science less well now than 50 years ago is that it has become so complicated.
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There are many people of color who are very talented.
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Racists have often used pseudoscience to justify their socially damaging views; watch these films to see how science, by replacing ignorance with knowledge, can undo that damage.
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Science 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.
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A goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.
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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.
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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.
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Moving forward will not be for the faint of heart. But if the next century witnesses failure, let it be because our science is not yet up to the job, not because we don’t have the courage to make less random the sometimes most unfair courses of human evolution.
JAMES WATSON