Science that leads over the horizon depends on gathering the best minds and enabling them to do what the best minds naturally seek to do: pursue the most thrilling questions of the time.
DNA was my only gold rush. I regarded DNA as worth a gold rush.
If you succeed with your first dream, it helps. You know, people trust you, possibly, for the second one. They give you a chance to play out your second one.
If I had been married earlier in life, I wouldn’t have seen the double helix. I would have been taking care of the kids on Saturday. On the other hand, I was lonely a lot of the time.
People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.
Biology has at least 50 more interesting years.
Do things as soon as you can. If a decision needs to be made, make it. It gives you more time to change your mind.
One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.
No good model ever accounted for all the facts, since some data was bound to be misleading if not plain wrong.
As an educator, I have always striven to see that the fruits of the American Dream are available to all.
I have been much blessed.
Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours. 5.
The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn’t believe in God, and so he had no hang-ups about souls.
Some think there is something wrong about enhancing people.
Never be the brightest person in the room.
The brain is the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe.
Moving forward will not be for the faint of heart. But if the next century witnesses failure, let it be because our science is not yet up to the job, not because we don’t have the courage to make less random the sometimes most unfair courses of human evolution.
Our goal should be to understand our differences.
My heroes were never scientists. They were Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood, you know, good writers.
I think the reason people are dealing with science less well now than 50 years ago is that it has become so complicated.
I never dreamed that in my lifetime my own genome would be sequenced.