James D. Watson Quotes
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I wanted to see if I could write a good book.
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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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DNA was my only gold rush. I regarded DNA as worth a gold rush.
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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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It's so difficult writing about living people.
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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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Genetically modified foods are good.
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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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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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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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My heroes were never scientists. They were Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood, you know, good writers.
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I wish there would be more movies about scientists.
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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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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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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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As an educator, I have always striven to see that the fruits of the American Dream are available to all.
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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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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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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.
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There are many people of color who are very talented.
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You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient.
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You move forward through knowledge. You prevail through knowledge. I love the word 'prevail.' Prevail!
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Ever since we achieved a breakthrough in the area of recombinant DNA in 1973, left-wing nuts and environmental kooks have been screaming that we will create some kind of Frankenstein bug or Andromeda Strain that will destroy us all.