Francis Crick

We were the first persons to see the structure of DNA as it really was.

The discovery of the double helix was, in large part, due to the unacknowledged contribution of Rosalind Franklin.

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.

The Center Dogma. This states that once 'information' has passed into protein it cannot get out again.

The meaning of this observation is unclear, but it raises the unfortunate possibility of ambiguous triplets; that is, triplets which may code more than one amino acid. However, one would certainly expect such triplets to be in a minority.

I think the odds are against there being life elsewhere, but I'm not sure.

The origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to be satisfied to get it going.

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.

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

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 clicks into place.

A good scientist values criticism almost higher than friendship: no, in science criticism is the height and measure of friendship.

The major credit I think Jim and I deserve... is for selecting the right problem and sticking to it.

We have discovered the secret of life!

The structure was too pretty not to be true.

I went home and told Odile that we seemed to have made a big discovery.

While the double helix has a certain symmetry, the two chains are not identical, but complementary.

You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

The Astonishing Hypothesis is that 'You', your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

The scientific belief is that our minds—the behavior of our brains—can be explained by the interactions of nerve cells (and other cells) and the molecules associated with them.

It is inherently unlikely that anything as complex as a nervous system could be completely understood in the near future.