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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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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
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Molecular
Workers
Suspect
Field
Expressed
Fields
Suspects
Actually
Biology
Desire
Strongly
Also
Motivated
Many
Rarely
Refute

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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.
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Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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God is a hacker, not an engineer
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A good scientist values criticism almost higher than friendship: no, in science criticism is the height and measure of friendship.
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Anybody who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help.
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Do codons overlap? In other words, as we read along the genetic message do we find a base which is a member of two or more codons? It now seems fairly certain that codons do not overlap.
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There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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If, for example, all the codons are triplets, then in addition to the correct reading of the message, there are two incorrect readings which we shall obtain if we do not start the grouping into sets of three at the right place.
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A busy life is a wasted life.
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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.
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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.
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A man who is right every time is not likely to do very much.
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