Erwin Chargaff Quotes

Molecular biology is essentially the practice of biochemistry without a license.

Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question 'How?' but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question 'Why?'

If you can modify a cell, it's only a short step to modifying a mouse, and if you can modify a mouse, it's only a step to modifying a higher animal, even man.

Outside his own ever-narrowing field of specialization, a scientist is a layman. What members of an academy of science have in common is a certain form of semiparasitic living.

One of the most insidious and nefarious properties of scientific models is their tendency to take over, and sometimes supplant, reality.

Life is the continuing intervention of the inexplicable.

When the so-called think tanks began to replace the thought processes of human beings, I called them the aseptic tanks.

If at one time or another I have brushed a few colleagues the wrong way, I must apologize: I had not realized that they were covered with fur.

He [said of one or other eminent colleagues] is a very busy man, and half of what he publishes is true, but I don't know which half.

Scientific fashions last longer than women's fashions but not as long as men's

We manipulate nature as if we were stuffing an Alsatian goose. We create new forms of energy; we make new elements; we kill crops; we wash brains. I can hear them in the dark sharpening their lasers.