Francis Crick - Biology Quotes

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The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.

Francis Crick
While Occam's razor is a useful tool in the physical sciences, it can be a very dangerous implement in biology. It is thus very rash to use simplicity and elegance as a guide in biological research.

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
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
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
Protein synthesis is a central problem for the whole of biology, and that it is in all probability closely related to gene action.

Francis Crick
I also suspect that many workers in this field [molecular biology] and related fields have been strongly motivated by the desire, rarely actually expressed, to refute vitalism.

Francis Crick
Molecular biology can be defined as anything that interests molecular biologists.

Francis Crick
The development of biology is going to destroy to some extent our traditional grounds for ethical belief, and it is not easy to see what to put in their place.

Francis Crick