Unravelling the Double Helix Quotes

“how does DNA control RNA? The structure of DNA must at least give us a hint.”
― Gareth Williams, Unravelling the Double Helix: The Lost Heroes of DNA

“what about Erwin Chargaff’s tantalising match of the base ratios, A = T and C = G? Is this just another of nature’s coincidences? Or is it a vital clue that will somehow make sense of the whole sorry mess?”
― Gareth Williams, Unravelling the Double Helix: The Lost Heroes of DNA

“What we can see of DNA is like a portrait of someone familiar, from which some vandal has cut out the features that make the face instantly recognisable.”
― Gareth Williams, Unravelling the Double Helix: The Lost Heroes of DNA

“By the end of 1939, 40,000 Americans had undergone involuntary, unconsented sterilisation. But at least nobody had been killed.”
― Gareth Williams, Unravelling the Double Helix: The Lost Heroes of DNA

“Phoebus Levene was characteristically blunt: ‘Nucleic acids carry no individuality, no specificity . . . It may be just to accept the conclusion of the biologist that they do not determine species specificity, nor are they carriers of the Mendelian characters.”
― Gareth Williams, Unravelling the Double Helix: The Lost Heroes of DNA

“Bohr argued that life was not infused into an organism by some mysterious ‘vital’ force but, like everything else in the universe, must be grounded in atoms and molecules that behaved according to the laws of physics and chemistry.”
― Gareth Williams, Unravelling the Double Helix: The Lost Heroes of DNA

“Mendel’s last forays into botany included the satisfying demonstration that even the greatest living scientists could be wrong. Armed with a fine paintbrush and a microscope, the poor-sighted abbot proved that a single grain of pollen was enough to fertilise an ovum – something that Charles Darwin had insisted was impossible.”
― Gareth Williams, Unravelling the Double Helix: The Lost Heroes of DNA