You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.

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

Attempts have been made from a study of the changes produced by mutation to obtain the relative order of the bases within various triplets, but my own view is that these are premature until there is more extensive and more reliable data on the composition of the triplets.

Our ... advantage was that we had evolved unstated but fruitful methods of collaboration ... If either of us suggested a new idea, the other, while taking it seriously, would attempt to demolish it in a candid but non-hostile manner.

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.

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

It is notoriously difficult to define the word living.