Francis Crick: Believer

Francis Crick was British molecular biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist; co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. Explore interesting quotes on believer.
Francis Crick: 32   quotes 0   likes

“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

New York NY: Simon & Schuster, 1981, p. 88.
Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (1981)

Life , Imagination , Idea , Knowledge

“And so to those of you who may be vitalists I would make this prophecy: what everyone believed yesterday, and you believe today, only cranks will believe tomorrow.”

Francis Crick

Of Molecules and Men (1966)

“My own prejudices are exactly the opposite of the functionalists’: “If you want to understand function, study structure,” I was supposed to have said in my molecular biology days. (I believe I was sailing at the time.) I think that one should approach these problems at all levels, as was done in molecular biology. Classical genetics is, after all, a black-box subject. The important thing was to combine it with biochemistry. In nature hybrid species are usually sterile, but in science the reverse is often true. Hybrid subjects are often astonishingly fertile, whereas if a scientific discipline remains too pure it usually wilts.”

Francis Crick

What Mad Pursuit (1988)

Understanding , Nature , Problem , Thinking

“Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick.”

Francis Crick

What Mad Pursuit (1988)