If you can modify a cell, it's only a short step to modifying a mouse, and if you can modify a mouse, it's only a step to modifying a higher animal, even man.

Molecular biology is essentially the practice of biochemistry without a license.

There are no such men today. We have created a mechanism that makes it practically impossible for a real genius to appear. In my own field the biochemist Fritz Lipmann or the much maligned Linus Pauling were very talented people. But generally, geniuses everywhere seem to have died out by 1914. Today, most are mediocrities blown up by the winds of the time.

A scientific autobiography belongs to a most awkward literary genre. If the difficulties facing a man trying to record his life are great - and few have overcome them successfully - they are compounded in the case of scientists, of whom many lead monotonous and uneventful lives and who, besides, often do not know how to write . . .

When the so-called think tanks began to replace the thought processes of human beings, I called them the aseptic tanks.

Life is the continuing intervention of the inexplicable.

He [said of one or other eminent colleagues] is a very busy man, and half of what he publishes is true, but I don't know which half.