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I think she [Rosalind Franklin] was a good experimentalist but certainly not of the first rank. She was simply not in the same class as Eigen or Bragg or Pauling, nor was she as good as Dorothy Hodgkin. She did not even select DNA to study. It was given to her. Her theoretical crystallography was very average.

Francis Crick

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Francis Crick
Age: 88 †
Born: 1916
Born: June 8
Died: 2004
Died: July 28
Biochemist
Biologist
Geneticist
Molecular Biologist
Neuroscientist
Physicist
Scientist
University Teacher
Francis Harry Compton Crick
Francis H.C. Crick
Thinking
Class
Franklin
Science
Rank
Given
Select
Firsts
Theoretical
Rosalind
First
Average
Experimentalist
Even
Certainly
Pauling
Good
Simply
Dorothy
Think
Study
Dna

More quotes by Francis Crick

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When you start in science, you are brainwashed into believing how careful you must be, and how difficult it is to discover things. There's something that might be called the 'graduate student syndrome' graduate students hardly believe they can make a discovery.
Francis Crick
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It seems likely that most if not all the genetic information in any organism is carried by nucleic acid - usually by DNA, although certain small viruses use RNA as their genetic material.
Francis Crick
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Unfortunately it makes the unambiguous determination of triplets by these methods much more difficult than would be the case if there were only one triplet for each amino acid.
Francis Crick
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Attempts have been made from a study of the changes produced by mutation to obtain the relative order of the bases within various triplets, but my own view is that these are premature until there is more extensive and more reliable data on the composition of the triplets.
Francis Crick
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A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong
Francis Crick
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It is notoriously difficult to define the word living.
Francis Crick
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How is the base sequence, divided into codons? There is nothing in the backbone of the nucleic acid, which is perfectly regular, to show us how to group the bases into codons.
Francis Crick
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Moreover the incorporation requires the same components needed for protein synthesis, and is inhibited by the same inhibitors. Thus the system is most unlikely to be a complete artefact and is very probably closely related to genuine protein synthesis.
Francis Crick
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What could be more foolish than to base one's entire view of life on ideas that, however plausible at the time, now appear to be quite erroneous? And what would be more important than to find our true place in the universe by removing one by one these unfortunate vestiges of earlier beliefs?
Francis Crick
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God is a hacker, not an engineer
Francis Crick
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Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.
Francis Crick
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Evolution is cleverer than you are.
Francis Crick
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It is one of the more striking generalizations of biochemistry - which surprisingly is hardly ever mentioned in the biochemical textbooks - that the twenty amino acids and the four bases, are, with minor reservations, the same throughout Nature.
Francis Crick
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Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice.
Francis Crick
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The balance of evidence both from the cell-free system and from the study of mutation, suggests that this does not occur at random, and that triplets coding the same amino acid may well be rather similar.
Francis Crick
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This seems highly likely, especially as it has been shown that in several systems mutations affecting the same amino acid are extremely near together on the genetic map.
Francis Crick
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There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.
Francis Crick
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I also suspect that many workers in this field [molecular biology] and related fields have been strongly motivated by the desire, rarely actually expressed, to refute vitalism.
Francis Crick
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There is no scientific study more vital to man than the study of his own brain. Our entire view of the universe depends on it.
Francis Crick
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It has yet to be shown by direct biochemical methods, as opposed to the indirect genetic evidence mentioned earlier, that the code is indeed a triplet code.
Francis Crick