If Watson and I had not discovered the [DNA] structure, instead of being revealed with a flourish it would have trickled out and that its impact would have been far less. For this sort of reason Stent had argued that a scientific discovery is more akin to a work of art than is generally admitted. Style, he argues, is as important as content. I am not completely convinced by this argument, at least in this case.

God is a hacker, not an engineer

The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he'll fight and die for it.

For simplicity one can think of the + class as having one extra base at some point or other in the genetic message and the - class as having one too few.

We have to take away from humans in the long run their reproductive autonomy as the only way to guarantee the advancement of mankind.

It would appear that the number of nonsense triplets is rather low, since we only occasionally come across them. However this conclusion is less secure than our other deductions about the general nature of the genetic code.

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.