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I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood. Perhaps in other company he is that way, but I have never had reason so to judge him.
Public speaking professionals say that you win or lose the battle to hold your audience in the first 30 seconds of a given presentation.
If you wanted to dissect the structure of living cells, genetic analysis was an extremely powerful method, so my interest turned to that.
I am lucky because I get to work with the smartest, most creative, and most devoted group of students and postdoctoral fellows imaginable.
The goal of scientists is you hope that the thing you're working on is bigger than the thing you're pipetting into that tube at the moment.
Scientists like ripping problems apart, collecting as much data as possible and then assembling the parts back together to make a decision.
The goal of scientists is you hope that the thing you're working on is bigger than the thing you're pipetting into that tube at that moment.
You can practice for 30 years and still not be a Mozart. The most lethal combination would be a Mozart who practiced for thousands of hours.
To put it bluntly, research shows that we can’t multitask. We are biologically incapable of processing attention-rich inputs simultaneously.
I get curious about new things. My real strength is going into a field that has not been investigated before, and finding new approaches to it.
As soon as you go into any biological process in any real detail, you discover it's open-ended in terms of what needs to be found out about it.
I think we have to believe we are here for some purpose, and I know there are many cynics who will deny it, but they don't live as if they deny it.
Although I am a public figure, I'm still a little shy. I don't think my own personality is important. I prefer to keep some small dosage of privacy.
It's incorrect to think of bacteria as these asocial, single cells. They are individual cells, but they act in communities, exactly the way people do.
To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologise unreservedly.
I would only once have the opportunity to let my scientific career encompass a path from the double helix to the three billion steps of the human genome.
I was making a lot of momentous personal decisions. I was still very very young: when the prize was awarded, I was 33; the work I had done when I was 21.
When I was in high school, I became interested in cytochemistry: chemical analysis under the microscope, and trying to understand the composition of cells.
For all my life, America was the place to be. And we somehow continue to be the place where there are real opportunities to change the world for the better.
Babies learn through a series of increasingly self-corrected ideas. They use very sophisticated hypothesis testing strategies to find out about their world.
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.
Bacteria live in unbelievable mixtures of hundreds or thousands of species. Like on your teeth. There are 600 species of bacteria on your teeth every morning.
My whole life has been basically trying to find intelligent students or, you know, highly motivated students and giving them an opportunity to do good science.
Whether at work, home or school, everybody carries their brain around them, and if the organ suffers from a disorder, we carry the disorder around with us too.
I think my formative experiences were really in junior high, where at a typical public school we were doing little genetic experiments, very classic experiments.
Take young researchers, put them together in virtual seclusion, give them an unprecedented degree of freedom and turn up the pressure by fostering competitiveness.
Human learning is a very aggressive style in its native state. I am not sure why, though it is a very useful trait in an unstable, unpredictable living environment.
In my lab, we are always thinking about how cells, bacterial cells, can talk to each other and then organize themselves into enormous groups that function in unison.
Having a first child is like swallowing an intoxicating drink made of equal parts joy and terror, chased with a bucketful of transitions nobody ever tells you about.
If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you would probably design something like a classroom.
Science moves with the spirit of an adventure characterized both by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty.
I'm chairing a UNESCO committee on how to improve global Internet communications for science; help third-world people get onto the Net so they can be part of the process.
Ultimately, we'll help the people we discriminate against if we try to understand more about them; genetics will lead to a world where there is a sympathy for the underdog.
I did get a very fine education, and not just in science. It took some pressure on the part of my elders to convince me that I really should take an interest in humanities.
If we have isolated individuals able to inflict enormous harm, imagine what a single lunatic can do with a nuclear weapon. I think the whole base of civil society is at risk.
If a bacterium is trying to infect you, it won't secrete alone, because your immune system will block it. Bacteria will hide until they can all act together and make an impact.
You can find bacteria everywhere. They're invisible to us. I've never seen a bacterium, except under a microscope. They're so small, we don't see them, but they are everywhere.
Here's why this matters: Studies show that a person who is interrupted takes 50 percent longer to accomplish a task. Not only that, he or she makes up to 50 percent more errors.
Racists have often used pseudoscience to justify their socially damaging views; watch these films to see how science, by replacing ignorance with knowledge, can undo that damage.
The brain appears to have been designed to solve problems related to surviving in an outdoor setting, in unstable meteorological conditions, and to do so in near constant motion.
If you are curious, you won't be satisfied with the "tyranny of custom." People stuck in that rut might say "why?" and the first thing an exploratory person would say is "why not?"
When antibiotics first came out, nobody could have imagined we'd have the resistance problem we face today. We didn't give bacteria credit for being able to change and adapt so fast.
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.
When antibiotics became industrially produced following World War II, our quality of life and our longevity improved enormously. No one thought bacteria were going to become resistant.
If I didn't teach the aerobics class, I wouldn't come, and I need to stay in shape. I've got a whole wardrobe of sleeveless dresses and strapless gowns, not to mention the short skirts.
[Bacteria] have an incredibly complicated chemical lexicon that ... allows bacteria to be multicellular. In the spirit of TED they're doing things together because it makes a difference.
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.
I started on the use of the Internet for scientific communication. Our research group was one of the very first to make really systematic use of it as a way of managing research projects.
If you want to solve very complex problems, you will have to end up letting machines work out a lot of the details for themselves, and in ways that we don't understand what they are doing.
I have great confidence in human curiosity - even though I don't know what curiosity is from a biological point of view. One of its characteristics has got to be the willingness to explore.