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If scientists don’t play God, who will?

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

Adventure Beautiful Character Science Simplicity Spirit Truth
No good model ever accounted for all the facts, since some data was bound to be misleading if not plain wrong.
JAMES WATSON

Goodness Model Responsibility Wrong
Knowing “why” (an idea) is more important than learning “what” (the fact).
JAMES WATSON

Ideas Important Knowledge Learning
Do things as soon as you can. If a decision needs to be made, make it. It gives you more time to change your mind.
JAMES WATSON

Change Decision Mindset Need Time
Never be the brightest person in the room.
JAMES WATSON

Bright One Liner Person Room
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

Direction Discrimination Help Leadership People Sympathy Try Understand
There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.
JAMES WATSON

Enough Evolution Humanity Identity Intellectual Reason Reservation Separation
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.
JAMES WATSON

Believe Father God Himself Lucky Myself Soul
[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

Bird Father Man Myself Stop Support Young
The pace of discovery is going unbelievably fast.
JAMES WATSON

Believe Discover Fast Speed
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

Biology Brain Connection Discover Mindset Science Universe
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 WATSON

Care Children Early Hands Life Lonely Marriage See Time
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

Culture Human Imagination Logic Personality Role Science Tradition
Take young researchers, put them together in virtual seclusion, give them an unprecedented degree of freedom and turn up the pressure by fostering competitiveness.
JAMES WATSON

Competition Research Togetherness Virtual Young
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

Better Creation Human Improvement Technology
You’ve never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient.
JAMES WATSON

Love Patience Yourself

If scientists don’t play God, who will?

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If scientists don’t play God, who will?

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