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 WATSONWe’re not all equal, it’s simply not true. That isn’t science.
More James Watson Quotes
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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 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.
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People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.
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You’ve never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient.
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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 has always been my preoccupation and when you think a breakthrough is possible, it is terribly exciting.
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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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Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you’re not going to hire them.
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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.
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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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The brain, is the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe.
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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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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 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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I don’t think we are here for anything. We’re just products of evolution. You can say, “Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don’t think there’s a purpose.” But I’m anticipating a good lunch.
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There are many people of color who are very talented.
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The pace of discovery is going unbelievably fast.
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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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[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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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.
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I never dreamed that in my lifetime my own genome would be sequenced.
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We’re not all equal, it’s simply not true. That isn’t science.
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If scientists don’t play God, who will?
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Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely.
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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.
JAMES WATSON