Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

Finally one should add that in spite of the great complexity of protein synthesis and in spite of the considerable technical difficulties in synthesizing polynucleotides with defined sequences it is not unreasonable to hope that all these points will be clarified in the near future, and that the genetic code will be completely established on a sound experimental basis within a few years.

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.

Anybody who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help.

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.

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

It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.