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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
Made
Believe
Would
Crick
Watson
Dna
Stress
Structure
Rather

More quotes by Francis Crick

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While Occam's razor is a useful tool in the physical sciences, it can be a very dangerous implement in biology. It is thus very rash to use simplicity and elegance as a guide in biological research.
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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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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.
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You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.
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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Anybody who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help.
Francis Crick
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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.
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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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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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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God is a hacker, not an engineer
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
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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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Protein synthesis is a central problem for the whole of biology, and that it is in all probability closely related to gene action.
Francis Crick
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You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.
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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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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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 is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.
Francis Crick
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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