I try to identify myself with the atoms ... I ask what I would do If I were a carbon atom or a sodium atom.

Every aspect of the world today - even politics and international relations - is affected by chemistry.

You can't have good ideas unless you have lots of ideas.

If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away.

...It would be possible to make much more progress than has been made if the NCI knew its job better, knew how to make discoveries...The NCI really does not know how to make discoveries....So long as the NCI is not willing to follow up ideas that seem good to people who have had experience making discoveries, the work of the NCI is going to be pedestrian.

We may, I believe, anticipate that the chemist of the future who is interested in the structure of proteins, nucleic acids, polysaccharides, and other complex substances with high molecular weight will come to rely upon a new structural chemistry, involving precise geometrical relationships among the atoms in the molecules and the rigorous application of the new structural principles, and that great progress will be made, through this technique, in the attack, by chemical methods, on the problems of biology and medicine.

You can trace every sickness, every disease and every ailment to a mineral deficiency.