Francis Crick
Francis Crick
Francis Harry Compton Crick OM FRSwas a British molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist, most noted for being a co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953 with James Watson. Together with Watson and Maurice Wilkins, he was jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material"...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth8 June 1916
Francis Crick quotes about
children may taught
Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children.
science evolution
Evolution is cleverer than you are.
origin-of-life mind evolution
Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.
lying trying may
To produce a really good biological theory one must try to see through the clutter produced by evolution to the basic mechanisms lying beneath them, realizing that they are likely to be overlaid by other, secondary mechanisms. What seems to physicists to be a hopelessly complicated process may have been what nature found simplest, because nature could only build on what was already there.
believe discovery might
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.
thinking discovery views
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. Both of us had decided, quite independently of each other, that the central problem in molecular biology was the chemical structure of the gene. ... We could not see what the answer was, but we considered it so important that we were determined to think about it long and hard, from any relevant point of view.
views ideas religion
What could be more foolish than to base one's entire view of life on ideas that, however plausible at the time, now appear to be quite erroneous? And what would be more important than to find our true place in the universe by removing one by one these unfortunate vestiges of earlier beliefs?
want structure-and-function study
If you want to understand function, study structure,
believe years needs
Anybody who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help.
men
A man who is right every time is not likely to do very much.
four acid twenties
It is one of the more striking generalizations of biochemistry - which surprisingly is hardly ever mentioned in the biochemical textbooks - that the twenty amino acids and the four bases, are, with minor reservations, the same throughout Nature.
molecules acid determined
It now seems certain that the amino acid sequence of any protein is determined by the sequence of bases in some region of a particular nucleic acid molecule.
doe foundation logical
If the code does indeed have some logical foundation then it is legitimate to consider all the evidence, both good and bad, in any attempt to deduce it.
life novelty chance
Chance is the only source of true novelty.