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Francis Crick
(8 Jun 1916 - 28 Jul 2004)
English biochemist and biophysicist who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine establishing the double-helix molecular structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid).
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Francis Crick Quotes on Life (6 quotes)
>> Click for 55 Science Quotes by Francis Crick
>> Click for Francis Crick Quotes on | DNA | Molecular Biology | Structure Of DNA | Watson_James |
>> Click for 55 Science Quotes by Francis Crick
>> Click for Francis Crick Quotes on | DNA | Molecular Biology | Structure Of DNA | Watson_James |
[Resist the temptation to] work so hard that there is no time left for serious thinking …[Scientists] should heed the saying, “A busy life is a wasted life.”
— Francis Crick
As quoted in J. Michael Bishop, How to Win the Nobel Prize: An Unexpected Life in Science (2009), 59. Citing What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery (1988), 145.
Almost all aspects of life are engineered at the molecular level, and without understanding molecules we can only have a very sketchy understanding of life itself.
— Francis Crick
What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery (1988), 61.
An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. But this should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions. The plain fact is that the time available was too long, the many microenvironments on the earth’s surface too diverse, the various chemical possibilities too numerous and our own knowledge and imagination too feeble to allow us to be able to unravel exactly how it might or might not have happened such a long time ago, especially as we have no experimental evidence from that era to check our ideas against.
— Francis Crick
In Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (1981), 88.
Chance is the only source of true novelty.
— Francis Crick
In Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (1981), 58.
It is notoriously difficult to define the word living.
— Francis Crick
Opening sentence in Of Molecules and Men (1966, 2004), 3.
While DNA could be claimed to be both simple and elegant, it must be remembered that DNA almost certainly originated fairly close to the origin of life when things were necessarily simple or they would not have got going.
— Francis Crick
In What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery (1988), 138.
See also:
- 8 Jun - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Crick's birth.
- Francis Crick: Hunter of Life's Secrets, by Robert Olby. - book suggestion.
- Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code, by Matt Ridley. - book suggestion.
- Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, by Francis Crick. - book suggestion.
- Of Molecules and Men, by Francis Crick. - book suggestion.
- Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature, by Francis Crick. - book suggestion.
- What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery, by Francis Crick. - book suggestion.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
