Crick Quotes

“You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.

I'm not saying you're more intelligent than Aristotle, or wiser. For all I know, Aristotle's the cleverest person who ever lived. That's not the point. The point is only that science is cumulative, and we live later.”
― Richard Dawkins

“Dr. Jules Hilbert: Hell Harold, you could just eat nothing but pancakes if you wanted.

Harold Crick: What is wrong with you? Hey, I don't want to eat nothing but pancakes, I want to live! I mean, who in their right mind in a choice between pancakes and living chooses pancakes?

Dr. Jules Hilbert: Harold, if you pause to think, you'd realize that that answer is inextricably contingent upon the type of life being led... and, of course, the quality of the pancakes. ”
― Zach Helm, Stranger Than Fiction: The Shooting Script

“At lunch Francis winged into the Eagle to tell everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life.”
― James D. Watson

“The fundamental biological variant is DNA. That is why Mendel's definition of the gene as the unvarying bearer of hereditary traits, its chemical identification by Avery (confirmed by Hershey), and the elucidation by Watson and Crick of the structural basis of its replicative invariance, are without any doubt the most important discoveries ever made in biology. To this must be added the theory of natural selection, whose certainty and full significance were established only by those later theories.”
― Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology

“When a student asked Linus Pauling how he got a good idea, the double Nobel Prize winner answered: 'You have a lot of ideas and you throw away the bad ones.' Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA, said that 'theorists in biology should realize that it is ... unlikely that they will produce a good theory at their first attempt. It is amateurs who have one big bright idea beautiful idea that they can never abandon. Professionals know that they have to produce theory after theory before they are likely to hit the jackpot.”
― Robert Aunger, The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think