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Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick.

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
Believe
Would
Crick
Watson
Dna
Stress
Structure
Rather
Made

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.
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A man who is right every time is not likely to do very much.
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The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.
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You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.
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A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong
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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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Again the message to experimentalists is: Be sensible but don't be impressed too much by negative arguments. If at all possible, try it and see what turns up. Theorists almost always dislike this sort of approach.
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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A good scientist values criticism almost higher than friendship: no, in science criticism is the height and measure of friendship.
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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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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A knowledge of the true age of the Earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do.
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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A busy life is a wasted life.
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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We have to take away from humans in the long run their reproductive autonomy as the only way to guarantee the advancement of mankind.
Francis Crick
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Almost all aspects of life are engineered at the molecular level, and without understanding molecules we can only have a very sketchy understanding of life itself.
Francis Crick
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Jim and I hit it off immediately, partly because our interests were astonishingly similar and partly, I suspect, because a certain youthful arrogance, a ruthlessness, an impatience with sloppy thinking can naturally to both of us.
Francis Crick
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A final proof of our ideas can only be obtained by detailed studies on the alterations produced in the amino acid sequence of a protein by mutations of the type discussed here.
Francis Crick
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The major credit I think Jim and I deserve is for selecting the right problem and sticking to it. It's true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold, but the fact remains that we were looking for gold.
Francis Crick