Sydney Brenner Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

Progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, probably in that order.

Sydney Brenner
I think one of the things about creativity is not to be afraid of saying the wrong thing.

Sydney Brenner
Current ideas of the uses of Model Organisms spring form the exemplars of the past and choosing the right organism for one's research is as important as finding the right problems to work on. In all my research these two problems have been closely intertwined.

Sydney Brenner
So that's when I saw the DNA model for the first time, in the Cavendish, and that's when I saw that this was it. And in a flash you just knew that this was very fundamental.

Sydney Brenner
As was predicted at the beginning of the Human Genome Project, getting the sequence will be the easy part as only technical issues are involved. The hard part will be finding out what it means, because this poses intellectual problems of how to understand the participation of the genes in the functions of living cells.

Sydney Brenner
A lot of the things that have been accomplished in science have been accomplished on the basis of ignorance … in the sense that you import into the science people from outside. Because once you have an established science, it has got its high priests — the guys who know everything that will work or won't work. And they don't want to be bothered. So you have to have a challenge. And the great thing is that young people are ignorant, and we should catch them before they turn into the priesthood. So I think that science should have a much more daring approach.

Sydney Brenner
Anything that is produced by evolution is bound to be a bit of a mess.

Sydney Brenner
Even God wouldn't get a grant today because somebody on the committee would say, oh those were very interesting experiments (creating the universe), but they've never been repeated. And then someone else would say, yes and he did it a long time ago, what's he done recently? And a third would say, to top it all, he published it all in an un-refereed journal (The Bible).

Sydney Brenner
A modern computer hovers between the obsolescent and the nonexistent.

Sydney Brenner
Have you tried neuroxing papers? It's a very easy and cheap process. You hold the page in front of your eyes and you let it go through there into the brain. It's much better than xeroxing.

Sydney Brenner