Francis Crick - Nature Quotes

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It is one of the more striking generalizations of biochemistry — which surprisingly is hardly ever mentioned in the biochemical textbooks — that the twenty amino acids and the four bases, are, with minor reservations, the same throughout Nature.

Francis Crick
It would appear that the number of nonsense triplets is rather low, since we only occasionally come across them. However this conclusion is less secure than our other deductions about the general nature of the genetic code.

Francis Crick
To produce a really good biological theory one must try to see through the clutter produced by evolution to the basic mechanisms lying beneath them, realizing that they are likely to be overlaid by other, secondary mechanisms. What seems to physicists to be a hopelessly complicated process may have been what nature found simplest, because nature could only build on what was already there.

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
The basic trouble is that nature is so complex that many quite different theories can go some way to explaining the results.... What constraints can be used as a guide through the jungle of possible theories? It seems to me that the only useful constraints are contained in the experimental evidence.

Francis Crick