There is nothing worth having that can he obtained by nuclear war - nothing material or ideological - no tradition that it can defend. It is utterly self-defeating.

There was a golden period that I look back upon with great regret, in which the cheapest of experimental animals were medical students. Graduate students were even better. In the old days, if you offered a graduate student a thiamine-deficient diet, he gladly went on it, for that was the only way he could eat. Science is getting to be more and more difficult.

Four elements, Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, also provide an example of the astonishing togetherness of our universe. They make up the "organic" molecules that constitute living organisms on a planet, and the nuclei of these same elements interact to generate the light of its star. Then the organisms on the planet come to depend wholly on that starlight, as they must if life is to persist. So it is that all life on the Earth runs on sunlight. [Referring to photosynthesis]

We living things are a late outgrowth of the metabolism of our galaxy. The carbon that enters into our composition was cooked in a remote past in a dying star. The waters of ancient seas set the pattern of ions in our blood. The ancient atmospheres moulded our metabolism.

It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a universe without physicists, and physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.

I have lived much of my life among molecules. They are good company.

One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are-as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation.