British Scientist Quotations

I dug things up. I was curious. I liked to draw what I found.

He told me that Francis Crick and Jim Watson had solved the structure of DNA, so we decided to go across to Cambridge to see it. This was in April of 1953.

It's the right idea, but not the right time.

You may have heard the world is made up of atoms and molecules, but it's really made up of stories. When you sit with an individual that's been here, you can give quantitative data a qualitative overlay.

For a deeper interest in the Moon than I ever felt before.

We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown.

It is my supposition that the Universe in not only queerer than we imagine, is queerer than we can imagine.

Nature's laws must be obeyed, and the period of decline begins, and goes on with accelerated rapidity.

All human discoveries seem to be made only for the purpose of confirming more strongly the truths come from on high, and contained in the sacred writings.

I have learned more from my mistakes than from my successes.

Although we followed that hyena for the best part of half an hour, we never caught up with it.

By shading off, as I have done, the portion of the area of the diagram according to the individual age, every one may see how much of life is consumed, and what is left.

The art galleries of Paris contain the finest collection of frames I ever saw.

I thought I was going to be a bum the rest of my life.

To expect the world to receive a new truth, or even an old truth, without challenging it, is to look for one of those miracles which do not occur.

It is sound judgment to hope that in the not too distant future we shall be competent to understand so simple a thing as a star.

A major one which no one can overlook is technological and based on inventions and discoveries which have altered the whole basis of production and deeply affected social relations.

The most important of my discoveries have been suggested to me by my failures.

I have examined the stomach contents of seven aardvarks.

Moreover, all our knowledge of organic remains teaches us, that species have a definite existence, and a centralization in geological time as well as in geographical space, and that no species is repeated in time.

At Olduvai, for 20 years, Mary and I had investigated and made a general survey of the overall geology.

Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

I felt that in time simple stone tools would be found in early Pleistocene in England.

The moment I saw the model and heard about the complementing base pairs I realized that it was the key to understanding all the problems in biology we had found intractable - it was the birth of molecular biology.

Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.

She stops, pauses, turns to the left to glance at some possible threat or irregularity, and then continues to the north. This motion, so intensely human, transcends time.

I don't think about art when I'm working. I try to think about life.

I kept an open mind on the question of whether a hominid had been present in Europe in the early Pleistocene.

During this period, I became interested in how the new techniques of cloning and sequencing DNA could influence the study of genetics and I was an early and active proponent of the Human Genome Sequencing Project.

Something unknown is doing we don't know what.

Without a common loyalty to either a state or a church they have nevertheless a vast deal in common.

It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational, and we can never succeed in formulating them.

If we pursue this matter further, we shall be told that the stable object is unchanging under the impact or stress of some particular external or internal variable or, perhaps, that it resists the passage of time.

I decided that the University of Sussex in Brighton was a good place for this work because it had a strong tradition in bacterial molecular genetics and an excellent reputation in biology.

Another cause of change, one less noticeable but fundamental, is the modern growth of population closely connected with scientific and medical discoveries. It is interesting that the United Nations has set up a special Commission to study this question.

Now this really is something to put on the mantelpiece.

What did our nation ever do to provoke these madly vicious enemies? What is seen as injustice in one place is seen as just requital in the other.

I went in with Jack and Leslie, into this room that was lined with brick, and there on the side I can remember very clearly was this small model with plates for the bases - the original model with everything screwed together.

We have lived through the flood time of fascism and of the nazism which ran its meteoric course at a cost to mankind in suffering and waste beyond all computation.

The foregoing considerations lead us to the very important conclusion, that matter is essentially force, and nothing but force; that matter, as popularly understood, does not exist, and is, in fact, philosophically inconceivable.

If your theory is found to be against the second law of theromodynamics, I give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

We speculate as to what is in store for us. But we not only undergo events, we in part cause them or at least influence their course. We have not only to study them but to act.

Proof is an idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself.

Now the whole point about machines is they are designed not to be random. When you call up a word processing program on your computer, you don't want it to be different every time you call it up. You want it to stay the same.

A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.

My 6 years with Murdoch were pivotal for my entire research career.

A key issue in developmental biology at that time was the problem of how cells underwent differentiation, with most workers concentrating on explanations in terms of changes in enzyme and gene regulation.

We explored about 180 miles of exposures, ranging from a depth of about 300 feet to 50 feet, before we undertook any major digging.

We decided to leave a part of each and every excavated area exactly as we had found it, protecting the specimens from rain and excessive sun.

X-Ray crystallography is nowadays an accurate and rapid method of determining conformation in the crystal lattice, which conformation usually corresponds to the preferred conformation in solution.

The processes of perception are inaccessible; only the products are conscious and, of course, it is the products that are necessary.

This progress in the molecular analysis of the cell cycle led to more interest being taken in my work and as a consequence to greater competition.

Many transition states have a well-defined preferred geometrical requirement.

My life-long interest in astronomy started then and I still regularly use a telescope for astronomical observations, although very much as an amateur.

My first research was concerned with propagation of radiation through inhomogeneous transparent media and this has remained a lifelong interest.

Of all these examples, the simplest but the most profound is the fact that it takes at least two somethings to create a difference.

Nature seems to have taken every precaution that these, her choicest treasures, may not lose value by being too easily obtained.

My Uncle Harry had given me a microscope as a present which allowed me to continue my personal explorations of the living world.

But technology is a tool, not a virtue.

I enjoyed my time at primary school because my teachers made the world seem such an interesting place and encouraged my innate curiosity.

From the point of view of any agent who imposes a quantitative change, any change of pattern which may occur will be unpredictable or divergent.

I think it's the most important find in view of human evolution. I was really looking for tools, but we never found any at the site.

It is a pleasure to me to run up to London and enjoy the collections at the National Gallery, South Kensington, and the Royal Academy.

Our water hole at the camp was little more than a liquid, muddy swamp, in which a rhino wallowed daily and added urine to the puddle.

Reflex inhibition acting against a reflex titanic contraction may diminish the contraction in one or other or all of several different ways.

My time as an undergraduate at Birmingham was extremely stimulating both as a biologist and also for my more general intellectual development.

My parents would have preferred me to become a surgeon or a physician but were most understanding of the ambitions of their son.

My parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe; my father came to South Africa from Lithuania in 1910, my mother, from Latvia, in 1922.

I withdrew my support for the validity of the evidence for early Pleistocene Stone Age tools in Europe on the grounds of not proven.

It does not seem, however, that organic chemists were much worried about barriers to rotation in organic molecules in general at that time because there was no technique available to demonstrate the phenomenon experimentally.

Well, I'm always hoping to hear from interested chemists and protein chemists, because I'd love for these experiments to be done properly.

Well, natural selection was an idea that Darwin developed by analogy with conscious human selection. That's where he got the idea from.

The point of what I'm doing is to talk not about science backed up by hundreds of committees, thousands of professors, and many tons of textbooks.

Tracing the paintings was often complicated because of high winds and by the difficulties of getting within reach of the paintings.

At the end of the 1980s as a complete surprise my old Edinburgh friend, Ed Southern offered me the Chair of Microbiology at the University of Oxford.

I spent 20 years sharing an office with Francis Crick and many new and exciting ideas (both right and wrong) were generated from our conversations.

Proof is the idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself.

During our first night in the new camp a number of lions came round to investigate. The lions contented themselves by roaring at us.

Another very interesting trend which it is not easy to classify is the growing repudiation of coercion, especially of violent or physical coercion.

Although there is a very large literature, still growing almost daily, on the Chinese calendar, its interest is, we suggest, much more archaeological and historical than scientific.

This meant that when I left school I had to work as a technician in a microbiological laboratory associated with the local Guinness brewery.

It was now 1980 and Anne and myself had two little children Sarah and Emily, and we were wondering whether to stay permanently in Edinburgh.

There was an enormous literature of stereochemical fact which had not been interpreted properly in its three-dimensional aspects.

I immediately began to read about bacterial viruses and in October 1952 I arrived in Oxford to do a Ph.D. in the Physical Chemistry Laboratory.

In general the preferred conformation in the crystalline state is that which would be predicted by the principles of conformational analysis.

In my final year I failed Medicine, scraped through Surgery but got a First Class in the third subject, Obstetrics and Gynecology.

In some units it may suppress the motor discharge altogether, in some it may merely slow the motor discharge thus lessening the wave frequency of the contraction and so the tension.

In other words the inhibitory process was found capable of no less delicate quantitative adjustment than is the excitatory process.

I held a research fellowship at St. John's College, Cambridge, and had been allowed to retain my rooms there while I was away in Africa.

In fact I am very much an experimentalist and an empiricist, so it would have been a major mistake for me to have abandoned this type of work.

I then walk off into the swamp along the path of logs and tree-trunks, picking my way cautiously, now glancing right and left on the foliage, and then surveying carefully the surface of the smooth round log I am walking on.

But I think that a little consideration will show you that belief is quite independent of our will, and our common expressions show it.

Come, fair repentance, daughter of the skies! Soft harbinger of soon returning virtue; The weeping messenger of grace from heaven.

The crocodile was laid stomach upwards to be cut open. The stomach contents included bracelets, beads, necklaces, and indications of human meals.

The first serious applications were in triterpenoid chemistry.

The mechanistic theory of nature is a theory of nature, and one that I think is wrong, or at least too limited. It's not an eternal truth.