Jim and I hit it off immediately, partly because our interests were astonishingly similar and partly, I suspect, because a certain youthful arrogance, a ruthlessness, an impatience with sloppy thinking can naturally to both of us.

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

Moreover the incorporation requires the same components needed for protein synthesis, and is inhibited by the same inhibitors. Thus the system is most unlikely to be a complete artefact and is very probably closely related to genuine protein synthesis.

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

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.

Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice.

You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.