The Double Helix Quotes

“One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that , in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.”
― James D. Watson, The Double Helix

“In the end, though, science is what matters; scientists not a bit.”
― Steve Jones, The Double Helix

“Worrying about complications before ruling out the possibility that the answer was simple would have been damned foolishness.”
― James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA

“​Briefly, the Indiana biochemists encouraged me to learn organic chemistry, but after I used a bunsen burner to warm up some benzene, I was relieved from further true chemistry. It was safer to turn out an uneducated Ph.D. than to risk another explosion.”
― James D. Watson, The Double Helix

“One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid”
― James D. Watson, The Double Helix

“One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.”
― James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA

“Al Hershey had sent me a long letter from Cold Spring Harbor summarizing the recently completed experiments by which he and Martha Chase established that a key feature of the infection of a bacterium by a phage was the injection of the viral DNA into the host bacterium. Most important, very little protein entered the bacterium. Their experiment was thus a powerful new proof that DNA is the primary genetic material. Nonetheless, almost no one in the audience of over four hundred microbiologists seemed interested as I read long sections of Hershey’s letter. Obvious exceptions were André Lwoff, Seymour Benzer, and Gunther Stent, all briefly over from Paris. They knew that Hershey’s experiments were not trivial and that from then on everyone was going to place more emphasis on DNA. To most of the spectators, however, Hershey’s name carried no weight.”
― James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA

“On the other hand, the sun of Naples might be conducive to learning something about the biochemistry of the embryonic development of marine animals.”
― James D. Watson, The Double Helix

“a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.”
― James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA

“I am sure this occasionally bothered Francis, even though he obviously knew that most High Table life is dominated by pedantic, middle aged men incapable of either amusing or educating him in anything worthwhile.”
― James D. Watson, The Double Helix

“O. T. Avery was carrying out experiments at the Rockefeller Institute in New York which showed that hereditary traits could be transmitted from one bacterial cell to another by purified DNA molecules.”
― James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA

“Though only about one half the mass of a bacterial virus was DNA (the other half being protein), Avery’s experiment made it smell like the essential genetic material.”
― James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA

“The key to Linus’ success was his reliance on the simple laws of structural chemistry. The α-helix had not been found by only staring at X-ray pictures; the essential trick, instead, was to ask which atoms like to sit next to each other. In place of pencil and paper, the main working tools were a set of molecular models superficially resembling the toys of preschool children”
― James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA