Francis Crick Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy and especially dislike reading experimental papers. He seemed to have very strong biological intuitions but unfortunately of negative sign.

Francis Crick
One can say, looking at the papers in this symposium, that the elucidation of the genetic code is indeed a great achievement. It is, in a sense, the key to molecular biology because it shows how the great polymer languages, the nucleic acid language and the protein language, are linked together.

Francis Crick
A comparison between the triplets tentatively deduced by these methods with the changes in amino acid sequence produced by mutation shows a fair measure of agreement.

Francis Crick
Both of us had decided, quite independently of each other, that the central problem in molecular biology was the chemical structure of the gene.

Francis Crick
If for example I had some idea, which as it turned out would be quite wrong, was going off of the tangent, Watson would tell me in no uncertain terms this was nonsense, and vice-versa. If he would have some idea I didn't like, and I would say so, this would shake his thinking about, and draw him back again. And in fact it is one of the requirements for collaborations of this sort, is you must be perfectly candid, one might almost say rude, to the person you're working with. It's useless working with somebody who is either much too junior than yourself or much too senior because then politeness creeps in. And this is the end of all real collaboration in science (giggles).

Francis Crick
The job of theorists, especially in biology, is to suggest new experiments. A good theory makes not only predictions, but surprising predictions that then turn out to be true. (If its predictions appear obvious to experimentalists, why would they need a theory?)

Francis Crick
My own prejudices are exactly the opposite of the functionalists': If you want to understand function, study structure, I was supposed to have said in my molecular biology days. (I believe I was sailing at the time.) I think that one should approach these problems at all levels, as was done in molecular biology. Classical genetics is, after all, a black-box subject. The important thing was to combine it with biochemistry. In nature hybrid species are usually sterile, but in science the reverse is often true. Hybrid subjects are often astonishingly fertile, whereas if a scientific discipline remains too pure it usually wilts.

Francis Crick
Jim [Watson] and I hit it off immediately, partly because our interests were astonishingly similar and partly, I suspect, because a certain youthful arrogance, a ruthlessness, an impatience with sloppy thinking can naturally to both of us.

Francis Crick
Tomorrow I may see (or be persuaded of) errors in my present thinking, but today I have to do the best I can.

Francis Crick
The balance of evidence both from the cell-free system and from the study of mutation, suggests that this does not occur at random, and that triplets coding the same amino acid may well be rather similar.

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

Francis Crick
Again the message to experimentalists is: Be sensible but don't be impressed too much by negative arguments. If at all possible, try it and see what turns up. Theorists almost always dislike this sort of approach.

Francis Crick