“All life is nucleic acid; the rest is commentary”

— Isaac Asimov , book The Relativity of Wrong

"The Relativity of Wrong" (1988) - "Beginning with Bone" (May 1987)
General sources

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Isaac Asimov 303

American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston Uni… 1920–1992

John R. Platt (1918–1992) American physicist

John R. Platt (1965). " Chemical Aspects of Genetics http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.pc.16.100165.002443?journalCode=physchem". In: Annual Review of Physical Chemistry.. Vol. 16. p. 503

“Start with a planet like the earth, with a complement of simple compounds bound to exist upon it, add the energy of a nearby sun, and you are bound to end with nucleic acids. You can't avoid it.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

"Constructing a Man" in Is Anyone There? (1967), p. 93
General sources

“The entire recent history of biology shows that we are, to a remarkable degree, the results of the interactions of an extremely complex array of molecules; and the aspect of biology that was once considered its holy of holies, the nature of the genetic material, has now been fundamentally understood in terms of the chemistry of its constituent nucleic acids, DNA and RNA, and their operational agents, the proteins.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Introduction (p. 7)
The Dragons of Eden (1977)

“We may, I believe, anticipate that the chemist of the future who is interested in the structure of proteins, nucleic acids, polysaccharides, and other complex substances with high molecular weight will come to rely upon a new structural chemistry, involving precise geometrical relationships among the atoms in the molecules and the rigorous application of the new structural principles, and that great progress will be made, through this technique, in the attack, by chemical methods, on the problems of biology and medicine.”

Linus Pauling (1901–1994) American scientist

Nobel Lecture (11 December 1954).
1940s-1960s

“My theory is that all women have hydrofluoric acid bottled up inside.”

Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) American writer

On difficulties with women, as quoted in "Kurt Vonnegut, Writer of Classics of the American Counterculture, Dies at 84" by Dinitia Smith in The New York Times (11 April 2007) http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/11/books/11cnd-vonnegut.html
Various interviews