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date: 23 March 2025

Francis Crick 1916–2004
English biophysicist 

  1. We have discovered the secret of life!
    on the discovery of the structure of DNA, 1953
    James D. Watson The Double Helix (1968)
  2. There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.
    The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (1995)
  3. ‘You’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.
    The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (1994) ch. 1
  4. 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.
    What Mad Pursuit (1988)
  5. It's true that by blundering about, we stumbled on gold, but the fact remains that we were looking for gold.
    of the discovery of the structure of DNA
    What Mad Pursuit (1988)