He [said of one or other eminent colleagues] is a very busy man, and half of what he publishes is true, but I don't know which half.

We manipulate nature as if we were stuffing an Alsatian goose. We create new forms of energy we make new elements we kill crops we wash brains. I can hear them in the dark sharpening their lasers.

You can stop splitting the atom you can stop visiting the moon you can stop using aerosols you may even decide not to kill entire populations by the use of a few bombs. But you cannot recall a new form of life.

The narrow slit through which the scientist, if he wants to be successful, must view nature constructs, if this goes on for a long time, his entire character and, more often than not, he ends up becoming what the German language so appropriately calls a Fachidiot (professional idiot).

A scientific autobiography belongs to a most awkward literary genre. If the difficulties facing a man trying to record his life are great - and few have overcome them successfully - they are compounded in the case of scientists, of whom many lead monotonous and uneventful lives and who, besides, often do not know how to write . . .

Life is the continuing intervention of the inexplicable.

Molecular biology is essentially the practice of biochemistry without a license.

Science is now the craft of the manipulation, substitution and deflection of the forces of nature. What I see coming is a gigantic slaughterhouse, an Auschwitz, in which valuable enzymes, hormones, and so on will be extracted instead of gold teeth.

The modern version of Buridan's ass [a figurative description of a man of indecision] has a Ph.D., but no time to grow up as he is undecided between making a Leonardo da Vinci in the test tube or planting a Coca Cola sign on Mars.

The results serve to disprove the tetranucleotide hypothesis. It is, however, noteworthy-whether this is more than accidental, cannot yet be said-that in all desoxypentose nucleic acids examined thus far the molar ratios of total purines to total pyrimidines, and also of adenine to thymine and of guanine to cytosine, were not far from 1.

If you can modify a cell, it's only a short step to modifying a mouse, and if you can modify a mouse, it's only a step to modifying a higher animal, even man.