It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.
A good scientist values criticism almost higher than friendship: no, in science criticism is the height and measure of friendship.
There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.
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.
Avoid the temptation to work so hard that there is no time left for serious thinking.
A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong.
If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong.
The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.
Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice.
It seems likely that most if not all the genetic information in any organism is carried by nucleic acid – usually by DNA, although certain small viruses use RNA as their genetic material.
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.
Free will is located in or near the anterior cingulate sulcus.
It now seems very likely that many of the 64 triplets, possibly most of them, may code one amino acid or another, and that in general several distinct triplets may code one amino acid.
God is a hacker, not an engineer.
Moreover the incorporation requires the same components needed for protein synthesis, and is inhibited by the same inhibitors. Thus the system is most unlikely to be a complete artefact and is very probably closely related to genuine protein synthesis.
A busy life is a wasted life.
The major credit I think Jim and I deserve is for selecting the right problem and sticking to it. It’s true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold, but the fact remains that we were looking for gold.
Exploratory research is really like working in a fog. You don’t know where you’re going. You’re just groping. Then people learn about it afterwards and think how straightforward it was.
In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy.
In the fullness of time, educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death.