Francis Crick Quotes About Science

Quotes about: Science

• 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

  Science, Men, Views

• Haemoglobin is a very large molecule by ordinary standards, containing about ten thousand atoms, but the chances are that your haemoglobin and mine are identical, and significantly different from that of a pig or horse. You may be impressed by how much human beings differ from one another, but if you were to look into the fine details of the molecules of which they are constructed, you would be astonished by their similarity.

  Francis Crick

  Horse, Science, Pigs

• 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

  Science, Thinking, Dna

• A busy life is a wasted life.

  Francis Crick

  Life, Science, Busy

  Francis Crick (2008). “What Mad Pursuit”, p.108, Hachette UK

• There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.

  Francis Crick

  Science, Average, Paper

  Francis Crick (1995). “Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

• Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

  Francis Crick

  Science, Origin Of Life, Mind

  Francis Crick (2008). “What Mad Pursuit”, p.104, Hachette UK

• 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

  Science, Thinking, Arrogance

• To produce a really good biological theory one must try to see through the clutter produced by evolution to the basic mechanisms lying beneath them, realizing that they are likely to be overlaid by other, secondary mechanisms. What seems to physicists to be a hopelessly complicated process may have been what nature found simplest, because nature could only build on what was already there.

  Francis Crick

  Nature, Lying, Science

• Evolution is cleverer than you are.

  Francis Crick

  Science, Graphic Design, Evolution

• 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

  Science, Synthesis, Action

• Trying to determine the structure of a protein by UV spectroscopy was like trying to determine the structure of a piano by listening to the sound it made while being dropped down a flight of stairs.

  Francis Crick

  Science, Engineering, Piano

• Chance is the only source of true novelty.

  Francis Crick

  Life, Science, Novelty

  Life Itself (p. 82)

• It is notoriously difficult to define the word living.

  Francis Crick

  Life, Live Life, Science

• 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

  Believe, Science, Discovery

• If Watson and I had not discovered the [DNA] structure, instead of being revealed with a flourish it would have trickled out and that its impact would have been far less. For this sort of reason Stent had argued that a scientific discovery is more akin to a work of art than is generally admitted. Style, he argues, is as important as content. I am not completely convinced by this argument, at least in this case.

  Francis Crick

  Art, Science, Impact

• 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. Both of us had decided, quite independently of each other, that the central problem in molecular biology was the chemical structure of the gene. ... We could not see what the answer was, but we considered it so important that we were determined to think about it long and hard, from any relevant point of view.

  Francis Crick

  Science, Thinking, Discovery

• Exact knowledge is the enemy of vitalism.

  Francis Crick

  Knowledge, Science, Enemy

• 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

  Life, Science, Understanding

  1988 What Mad Pursuit, ch.5.

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