Francis Crick - Science Quotes

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When you start in science, you are brainwashed into believing how careful you must be, and how difficult it is to discover things. There's something that might be called the 'graduate student syndrome'; graduate students hardly believe they can make a discovery.

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
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
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 average adult can usually enjoy something only if it relates to what he knows already, and what he knows about science is in many cases pitifully inadequate.

Francis Crick
One of the striking characteristics of modern science is that it often moves so fast that a research worker can see rather clearly whether his earlier ideas, or those of his contemporaries, were correct or incorrect.

Francis Crick
I have no doubt, as will emerge later, that this loss of faith in Christian religion and my growing attachment to science plays a dominant part in my scientific career, not so much on a day-to-day basis but in the choice of what I have considered interesting and important.

Francis Crick
Mathematics cares neither for science nor for engineering (except as a source of problems) but only about the relationship between abstract entities.

Francis Crick