Quotes from Francis Crick

If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong.

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.

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.

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.

A good scientist values criticism almost higher than friendship: no, in science criticism is the height and measure of friendship.

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

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

Chance is the only source of true novelty.

A busy life is a wasted life.

In the fullness of time, educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death.

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

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.

We've discovered the secret of life.

It is notoriously difficult to define the word living.

Avoid the temptation to work so hard that there is no time left for serious thinking.

A man who is right every time is not likely to do very much.

We are sometimes asked what the result would be if we put four +'s in one gene. To answer this my colleagues have recently put together not merely four but six +'s.

It now seems certain that the amino acid sequence of any protein is determined by the sequence of bases in some region of a particular nucleic acid molecule.

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.

If the code does indeed have some logical foundation then it is legitimate to consider all the evidence, both good and bad, in any attempt to deduce it.

For simplicity one can think of the + class as having one extra base at some point or other in the genetic message and the - class as having one too few.

"You," your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

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.

It is not easy to convey, unless one has experienced it, the dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clicks into place. One immediately sees how many previously puzzling facts are neatly explained by the new hypothesis. One could kick oneself for not having the idea earlier, it now seems so obvious. Yet before, everything was in a fog.