Erwin Chargaff Quotes

77 Sourced Quotes

Knowledge and wisdom are far from being communicating vessels, and the level of one has no bearing on that of the other.

Erwin Chargaff
The practitioner of a science must know much more than he can know. Ignorance is no handicap in the arts - Renoir did not have to have seen all the nudes that were painted before him.

Erwin Chargaff
The initial incommunicability of truth, scientific or otherwise, shows that we think in grooves, and that it is painful for us to be torn away from the womblike security of accepted concepts.

Erwin Chargaff
The kind of questions we ask is conditioned by the kind of answers we expect.

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

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

Erwin Chargaff
The Oscars of science do not set trends, but follow them.

Erwin Chargaff
Thus, astronomy was probably the first exact science, practiced long before the concept of science as such had been formulated. (Mathematics may have been earlier, but I do not consider it a natural science: the mother of many kings is not necessarily a queen.)

Erwin Chargaff
In science we always know much less than we believe we do.

Erwin Chargaff
A good teacher can only have dissident pupils.

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
Most students no longer study nature; they test models.

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

Erwin Chargaff
It is true of every scientific discovery that the road means more than the goal.

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
Great scientists are particularly worth listening to when they speak about something of which they know little; in their own specialty they are usually great and dull.

Erwin Chargaff
The sciences, like other professions, cannot endure if their practitioners are unable to know more than an ever smaller portion of what they must know in order to function properly.

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
Biochemistry is helpless before life, having to kill the organism before investigating it. Biochemistry is, in fact, much more successful in practicing the second part of its composite name than in following the prefix.

Erwin Chargaff
What I see coming is a gigantic slaughterhouse, a molecular Auschwitz, in which valuable enzymes, hormones, and so on will be extracted instead of gold teeth.

Erwin Chargaff
What makes the study of nature so magnificent is its very giveness; it is because it is; it is as it is; and tolle, lege! (pick up and read!) remains its eternal admonition.

Erwin Chargaff
Never before has science become so alienated from the common man, and he, in turn, so suspicious of science.

Erwin Chargaff
I am not sure whether one can say that man - just as he possesses an almost instinctive sense of symmetry - is governed by an equally elemental desire for simplicity.

Erwin Chargaff
A scientific autobiography belongs to a most awkward literary genre. If the difficulties facing a man trying to record his life are great - and few have overcome them successfully - they are compounded in the case of scientists, of whom many lead monotonous and uneventful lives and who, besides, often do not know how to write...

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