Quotes About Francis Crick

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

I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood. Perhaps in other company he is that way, but I have never had reason so to judge him.

with the elucidation of the genetic code in 1966, Francis Crick confidently declared vitalism dead and buried. Only it still lives on in various pseudosciences. Homeopathy is based on vitalism. Its founder Samuel Hahnemann believed that diseases 'are solely spirit-like (dynamic) derangements of the spirit-like power (the vital principle) that animates the human body'.

As Francis Crick liked to say, "Any theory that can account for all the facts is wrong, because some of the facts are wrong.

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.

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.

My own prejudices are exactly the opposite of the functionalists': "If you want to understand function, study structure".

Similarly, in 1968, Francis Crick suggested that the origin of the genetic code might be a "frozen accident."3 Most

The meaning of this observation is unclear, but it raises the unfortunate possibility of ambiguous triplets; that is, triplets which may code more than one amino acid. However one would certainly expect such triplets to be in a minority.

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.

Even atheist Nobel Laureate, Francis Crick, admitted, "An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have to have been satisfied to get it going.

Francis Crick, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA, believes that DNA could only have arrived from space, sent in the form of bacteria from more advanced civilizations.

He told me that Francis Crick and Jim Watson had solved the structure of DNA, so we decided to go across to Cambridge to see it. This was in April of 1953.

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.

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.

No engineer would have dreamed of such an inelegant solution, which goes to illustrate the opportunistic nature of evolution. (As Francis Crick once said, 'God is a hacker, not an engineer.')

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.