Erwin Chargaff Quotes

77 Sourced Quotes

We can explain it all, but understand only very little.

Erwin Chargaff
Science cannot be a mass occupation, any more than the composing of music or the painting of pictures.

Erwin Chargaff
Scientific fashions last longerthanwomen's fashions but not as long as men's.

Erwin Chargaff
In no other science[ than biology] is the span so wide between what it ought to understand and what it can understand.

Erwin Chargaff
There is no question in my mind that we live in one of the truly bestial centuries in human history. There are plenty of signposts for the future historian, and what do they say? They say 'Auschwitz' and 'Dresden' and 'Hiroshima' and 'Vietnam' and 'Napalm.' For many years we all woke up to the daily body count on the radio. And if there were a way to kill people with the B Minor Mass, the Pentagon-Madison Avenue axis would have found it.

Erwin Chargaff
The results serve to disprove the tetranucleotide hypothesis. It is, however, noteworthy-whether this is more than accidental, cannot yet be said-that in all desoxypentose nucleic acids examined thus far the molar ratios of total purines to total pyrimidines, and also of adenine to thymine and of guanine to cytosine, were not far from 1.

Erwin Chargaff
Models — in contrast to those who sat for Renoir — improve with age.

Erwin Chargaff
Through each of the great scientific-technological exploits, the points of contact between humanity and reality are diminished irreversibly.

Erwin Chargaff
Thinking is like catching pigeons with a net. You may pull your rope never so quick sometimes and catch nothing but a feather.

Erwin Chargaff
One of the most insidious and nefarious properties of scientific models is their tendency to take over, and sometimes supplant, reality.

Erwin Chargaff
There are few things in the world before which the biochemist feels as uncomfortable as when he has to deal with life itself.

Erwin Chargaff
There is no real popularization [of science] possible, only vulgarization that in most instances distorts the discoveries beyond recognition.

Erwin Chargaff
Humanity has an enormous capacity to disregard the incomprehensible.

Erwin Chargaff
Like all good things in life, we seem to have noticed the environment only when it began to deteriorate.

Erwin Chargaff
To the scientist nature is like a mirror that breaks every thirty years; and who cares about the broken glass of past times?

Erwin Chargaff
Unpredictable associations and the free play of imagination are no less important in science, that is, in real science, than they are in writing.

Erwin Chargaff
A classic in science is a man who no longer has to be quoted.

Erwin Chargaff
When a science approaches the frontiers of its knowledge, it seeks refuge in allegory or in analogy.

Erwin Chargaff
Now one could say, at the risk of some superficiality, that there exist principally two types of scientists. The ones, and they are rare, wish to understand the world, to know nature; the others, far more frequent, wish to explain it. The first are searching for truth, often with knowledge that they will not attain it; the second strive for plausibility, for the achievement of an intellectually consistent, and hence successful, view of the world.

Erwin Chargaff
In most sciences the question Why? is forbidden and the answer is actually to the question, How? Science is much better in explaining than in understanding, but it likes to mistake one for the other.

Erwin Chargaff
The modern version of Buridan's ass has a Ph.D., but no time to grow up as he is undecided between making a Leonardo da Vinci in the test tube or planting a Coca Cola sign on Mars.

Erwin Chargaff
If at one time or another I have brushed a few colleagues the wrong way, I must apologize: I had not realized that they were covered with fur.

Erwin Chargaff
Molecular biology is essentially the practice of biochemistry without a license.

Erwin Chargaff
The narrow slit through which the scientist, if he wants to be successful, must view nature constructs, if this goes on for a long time, his entire character; and, more often than not, he ends up becoming what the German language so appropriately calls a Fachidiot (professional idiot).

Erwin Chargaff
He [said of one or other eminent colleagues] is a very busy man, and half of what he publishes is true, but I don't know which half.

Erwin Chargaff
Outside his own ever-narrowing field of specialization, a scientist is a layman. What members of an academy of science have in common is a certain form of semiparasitic living.

Erwin Chargaff
You can stop splitting the atom; you can stop visiting the moon; you can stop using aerosols; you may even decide not to kill entire populations by the use of a few bombs. But you cannot recall a new form of life.

Erwin Chargaff
When the so-called think tanks began to replace the thought processes of human beings, I called them the aseptic tanks.

Erwin Chargaff
We manipulate nature as if we were stuffing an Alsatian goose. We create new forms of energy; we make new elements; we kill crops; we wash brains. I can hear them in the dark sharpening their lasers.

Erwin Chargaff
I have always oscillated between the brightness of reality and the darkness of the unknowable.

Erwin Chargaff