James D. Watson Quotes
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I wanted to see if I could write a good book.
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The ever quickening advances of science made possible by the success of the Human Genome Project will also soon let us see the essences of mental disease. Only after we understand them at the genetic level can we rationally seek out appropriate therapies for such illnesses as schizophrenia and bipolar disease.
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It's necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant.
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It's so difficult writing about living people.
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I've had strong opinions probably since I was born. It makes you unpopular, but what can you do?
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Genetically modified foods are good.
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I had become monomaniacal about DNA only in 1951 when I had just turned 23 and as a postdoctoral fellow was temporarily in Naples attending a small May meeting on biologically important macromolecules.
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If you succeed with your first dream, it helps. You know, people trust you, possibly, for the second one. They give you a chance to play out your second one.
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'Genes, Girls, and Gamow' was an attempt, even more than 'The Double Helix,' to mix science with one's personal life. With 'The Double Helix,' no one had done it before, but I thought I'd try.
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If we could honestly promise young couples that we knew how to give them offspring with superior character, why should we assume they would decline? Common sense tells us that if scientists find ways to greatly improve human capabilities, there will no stopping the public from happily seizing them.
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My whole life has been basically trying to find intelligent students or, you know, highly motivated students and giving them an opportunity to do good science.
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I wish there would be more movies about scientists.
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Here at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, we have genetically rearranged various viruses and bacteria as part of our medical research. In fact, we have been able to create entirely new types of DNA molecules by splicing together the genetic information from different organisms - recombinant DNA.
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As an educator, I have always striven to see that the fruits of the American Dream are available to all.
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My heroes were never scientists. They were Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood, you know, good writers.
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I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood. Perhaps in other company he is that way, but I have never had reason so to judge him.
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If you go into science, I think you better go in with a dream that maybe you, too, will get a Nobel Prize. It's not that I went in and I thought I was very bright and I was going to get one, but I'll confess, you know, I knew what it was.
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There are many people of color who are very talented.
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I first became aware of Charles Darwin and evolution while still a schoolboy growing up in Chicago. My father and I had a passion for bird-watching, and when the snow or the rain kept me indoors, I read his bird books and learned about evolution.
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The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn't believe in God, and so he had no hang-ups about souls.
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You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient.
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I never could read science fiction. I was just uninterested in it. And you know, I don't like to read novels where the hero just goes beyond what I think could exist. And it doesn't interest me because I'm not learning anything about something I'll actually have to deal with.
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If someone's liver doesn't work, we blame it on the genes; if someone's brain doesn't work properly, we blame the school. It's actually more humane to think of the condition as genetic. For instance, you don't want to say that someone is born unpleasant, but sometimes that might be true.
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I started doing science when I was effectively 20, a graduate student of Salvador Luria at Indiana University. And that was - you know, it took me about two years, you know, being a graduate student with Luria deciding I wanted to find the structure of DNA; that is, DNA was going to be my objective.