Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A busy life is a wasted life.
God is a hacker, not an engineer
Evolution is cleverer than you are.
We've discovered the secret of life.
You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.
Exact knowledge is the enemy of vitalism.
Chance is the only source of true novelty.
It is notoriously difficult to define the word living.
A man who is right every time is not likely to do very much.
In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy.
Free will is located in or near the anterior cingulate sulcus.
You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.
Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice.
If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong.
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
Anybody who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help.
The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he'll fight and die for it.
If poly A is added to poly U, to form a double or triple helix, the combination is inactive.
Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.
Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children.
There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.
The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.
My own prejudices are exactly the opposite of the functionalists': "If you want to understand function, study structure".
There is no scientific study more vital to man than the study of his own brain. Our entire view of the universe depends on it.
In the fullness of time, educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death.
Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick.
A good scientist values criticism almost higher than friendship: no, in science criticism is the height and measure of friendship.
Protein synthesis is a central problem for the whole of biology, and that it is in all probability closely related to gene action.
We have to take away from humans in the long run their reproductive autonomy as the only way to guarantee the advancement of mankind.
It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.
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.
For simplicity one can think of the + class as having one extra base at some point or other in the genetic message and the - class as having one too few.
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.
It has yet to be shown by direct biochemical methods, as opposed to the indirect genetic evidence mentioned earlier, that the code is indeed a triplet code.
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.
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.
We are sometimes asked what the result would be if we put four +'s in one gene. To answer this my colleagues have recently put together not merely four but six +'s.
A comparison between the triplets tentatively deduced by these methods with the changes in amino acid sequence produced by mutation shows a fair measure of agreement.
This seems highly likely, especially as it has been shown that in several systems mutations affecting the same amino acid are extremely near together on the genetic map.
It is not easy to convey, unless one has experienced it, the dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clinches into place.
How is the base sequence, divided into codons? There is nothing in the backbone of the nucleic acid, which is perfectly regular, to show us how to group the bases into codons.
I also suspect that many workers in this field [molecular biology] and related fields have been strongly motivated by the desire, rarely actually expressed, to refute vitalism.
A final proof of our ideas can only be obtained by detailed studies on the alterations produced in the amino acid sequence of a protein by mutations of the type discussed here.
Unfortunately it makes the unambiguous determination of triplets by these methods much more difficult than would be the case if there were only one triplet for each amino acid.
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.
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.
Do codons overlap? In other words, as we read along the genetic message do we find a base which is a member of two or more codons? It now seems fairly certain that codons do not overlap.
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.
While Occam's razor is a useful tool in the physical sciences, it can be a very dangerous implement in biology. It is thus very rash to use simplicity and elegance as a guide in biological research.