Francis Crick Quotes and Sayings
Evolution is more intelligent than you.
The main credit that I think Jim and I deserve is to select the right problem and fulfil it. It is true that when we stumbled, we stumbled over the gold, but the fact is that we were looking for gold.
To produce an excellent biological theory, one must try to see through the disorder created by evolution the fundamental mechanisms that lie beneath them, realizing that they are likely to be superimposed by other secondary mechanisms. What for physicists seems to be a desperately complicated process, may have been what Nature found simpler because Nature could only build on what was already there.
Francis Crick Quotes
Jim and I got along right away, in part because our interests were amazingly similar and, in part, I suspect, because a certain youthful arrogance, cruelty, and impatience with sloppy thinking can naturally come to us both.
If the revealed religions have revealed something, it is that they are generally wrong.
It does not escape us that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copy mechanism for the genetic material.
I think she [Rosalind Franklin] was a good experimenter, but certainly not first-rate. She simply was 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. They gave it to her. His theoretical crystallography was very average.
Exact knowledge is the enemy of vitalism.
A busy life is a wasted life.
Almost all aspects of life are designed at the molecular level, and without understanding molecules we can only have a very superficial understanding of life itself.
When you start in science, they brainwash you so you can believe how careful you must be and how difficult it is to discover things. There is something that could be called the “graduate student syndrome”; Graduate students barely believe they can make a discovery.
If Watson and I had not discovered the structure of [DNA], instead of revealing it with a flourish, it would have spilled and its impact would have been much less. For this kind of reason, Stent had argued that a scientific discovery is more like a work of art than is generally admitted. Style, he argues, is as important as the content. I am not completely convinced by this argument, at least in this case.
The biggest credit that I think Jim and I deserve … is to select the right problem and fulfill it. It is true that when we stumbled, we stumbled over the gold, but the fact is that we were looking for gold. We had both decided, 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 felt it was so important that we were determined to think about it for a long time, from any relevant point of view.
What could be more foolish than basing the whole vision of life on ideas that, although plausible at that time, now seem to be quite wrong? And what would be more important than finding our true place in the universe by eliminating one by one these unfortunate vestiges of previous beliefs?
Francis Crick Quotes
A good scientist values criticism almost above friendship: no, in science criticism is the height and measure of friendship.
Since I essentially did not know anything, I had an almost completely free choice.
The dangerous man is the only one who has only one idea, because then he will fight and die for it.
I also suspect that many workers in this field [molecular biology]and related fields have been strongly motivated by the rarely expressed desire to refute vitalism.
Finally, it should be added that despite the great complexity of protein synthesis and despite the considerable technical difficulties in synthesizing polynucleotides with defined sequences, it is not unreasonable to expect all these points to be clarified in the near future, and that genetics The code will be fully established on a solid experimental basis in a few years.
It can be said, looking at the documents of this symposium, that the elucidation of the genetic code is really a great achievement. It is, in a certain sense, the key to molecular biology because it shows how the great polymer languages, the language of nucleic acids and the language of proteins are united.
Christianity may be fine between adults who consent in private but should not be taught to young children.
Hemoglobin is a very large molecule by common standards, containing about ten thousand atoms, but it is likely that his hemoglobin and mine are identical and significantly different from those of a pig or a horse. You can be impressed by the number of human beings that differ from each other, but if you had to look at the fine details of the molecules they are built from, you would be surprised at their similarity.
Our … advantage was that we had developed undeclared but fruitful collaboration methods … If any of us suggested a new idea, the other, by taking it seriously, would try to demolish it in a candid but not hostile way.
In my experience, most mathematicians are intellectually vague.
There is no way of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific article.
God is a hacker, not an engineer
Again, the message for the experimenters is: be sensible, but do not be too impressed by the negative arguments. If possible, try it and see what happens. Theorists almost always do not like this kind of approach.
A theory should not try to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are incorrect
If you want to understand the function, study the structure,
You are nothing more than a packet of neurons.
You can reverse engineer, but you can not do reverse piracy.
Instead of believing that Watson and Crick did the DNA structure, I would prefer to emphasize that the structure made Watson and Crick.
We have to take long-term humans away from their reproductive autonomy as the only way to guarantee the advancement of humanity.
You are nothing more than a packet of neurons.
You can reverse engineer, but you can do reverse piracy.
It is not likely that a man who is right at all times will do much.
Anyone who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help.
And for those of you who can be vitalists, I would make this prophecy: what everyone believed yesterday, and you believe today, only the connecting rods will believe tomorrow.
Big questions get great answers.
We had both decided, independently of each other, that the central problem in molecular biology was the chemical structure of the gene.
The work of theorists, especially in biology, is to suggest new experiments. A good theory not only makes predictions but also surprising predictions that turn out to be true.
The ultimate goal of the modern movement in biology is, in fact, to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.
There is no more vital scientific study for man than the study of his own brain. All our vision of the universe depends on it.
The knowledge of the true age of the Earth and 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.
We have discovered the secret of life.
It is one of the most striking generalizations of biochemistry – surprisingly almost never mentioned in biochemical textbooks – that the twenty amino acids and the four bases are, with little reservations, the same in all of Nature.
The meaning of this observation is not clear, but it raises the unfortunate possibility of ambiguous triplets; that is, triplets that can encode more than one amino acid. However, one would expect those triplets to be a minority.
The balance of evidence from both the cell-free system and the study of mutations suggests that this does not happen at random and that the triplets that encode the same amino acid can be quite similar.
It seems likely that most, if not all, genetic information in any organism is transmitted by nucleic acid, usually by DNA, although certain small viruses use RNA as a genetic material.
It seems that the number of meaningless triplets is quite low, since only occasionally do we find them. However, this conclusion is less certain than our other deductions about the general nature of the genetic code.
A comparison between triplets tentatively deduced by these methods with changes in the amino acid sequence produced by the mutation shows a fair measure of agreement.
A final test of our ideas can only be obtained through detailed studies on the alterations produced in the amino acid sequence of a protein by mutations of the type discussed here.
Attempts have been made from a study of the changes produced by the mutation to obtain the relative order of the bases within several triplets, but my own opinion is that these are premature until there are more extensive and more reliable data on the composition of the triplets.
To simplify, one may think that the class + has an extra base at some time or another in the genetic message and the class has a very low one.
If, for example, all the codons are triplets, then, in addition to the correct reading of the message, there are two incorrect readings that we will obtain if we do not start grouping in groups of three in the correct place.
It has not yet been demonstrated by direct biochemical methods, unlike the indirect genetic evidence mentioned above, that the code is in fact a triplet code.
This seems very likely, especially because it has been shown that, in several systems, mutations that affect the same amino acid are extremely close together in the genetic map.
If poly A is added to poly U, to form a double or triple helix, the combination is inactive.
Do the codons overlap? In other words, as we read the genetic message, do we find a base that is a member of two or more codons? Now it seems quite true that the codons do not overlap.
How is the sequence of bases divided into codons? There is nothing in the backbone of the nucleic acid, which is perfectly regular, that shows us how to group the bases into codons.
If the code really has some logical basis, then it is legitimate to consider all the tests, both good and bad, in any attempt to deduce it.
Now it seems very likely that many of the 64 triplets, possibly most of them, encode one amino acid or another, and that, in general, several different triplets encode an amino acid.
Sometimes they ask us what the result would be if we put four + in a gene. To answer this, my colleagues have recently gathered not only four but six + ‘s.
In addition, incorporation requires the same components necessary for protein synthesis, and is inhibited by the same inhibitors. Therefore, it is very unlikely that the system is a complete artifact and is most likely closely related to the synthesis of genuine proteins.
Unfortunately, the unmistakable determination of triplets by these methods is much more difficult than would be the case if there were only one triplet for each amino acid.
Protein synthesis is a central problem for all biology, and is, in all likelihood, closely related to the action of genes.
Exploratory research is like working in the fog. You do not know where you are going You’re just groping. Then people learn it later and think how simple it was.
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