The Eighth Day of Creation – My Favorite Quotations

The Eighth Day of Creation by Horace Freeland Judson had a moving effect on me as a graduate student. So much so, that I sat down way back then and typed out my favorite quotations. These people who were quoted in the book were the ones who discovered the building blocks of the genetic basis for life. Biological heroes of the twentieth century. Some were intensely jealous of the success of Watson and Crick. It shows.

I recently found the page, which I had kept away on file for almost forty years. I think I should share what I found so inspiring back then.

He (James Watson) found it partly because he never made the mistake of confusing hard work with hard thinking; he always refused to substitute one for the other. -Max Perutz

Jim (Watson) makes the very great distinction. If something is not worth doing, it is not worth doing well.  -Salvador Luria.

I don’t think there has ever been anybody doing great science whose ego has not been involved very, very deeply. It’s one of those things that make science so competitive.  – S.J. Singer

Humility is not a state of mind conducive to the advancement of learning.  -Sir Peter Medawar

That in our day such pygmies throw such giant shadows only shows how late in the day it has become.  -Erwin Chargaff (on the Watson-and-Crick style of science).

Knowledge is an attitude, a passion. Actually an illicit attitude. For the compulsion to know is a mania, just like dipsomania, erotomania, homicidal mania: it produces a character out of balance. It is not at all true that the scientist goes after truth. It goes after him. It is something he suffers from.  -Kierkegaard

It (competitiveness) is the dominant motive in science…The chief emotion in the field. The second is you have to prove to yourself that you can do it – and that’s just the same thing. You’ve got to keep doing it; you can’t just – once.    -James Watson.

“…attractive ideas, after all, are cheap and much of the stuff of scientific genius is devising tests.” – H.F. Judson

“She had a prime instance of what Delbruck once called “the principle of limited sloppiness”.   -H.F. Judson on Marianne Grunberg-Manago

“I thought that in your account I saw one reason, perhaps a basic reason, why science is almost always done best by young men. Science was a game. It demanded absorption to the point of innocence. We were like children playing.   -Francois Jacob, narrated by H.F. Judson

“Almost every scientist winds up working on a problem he can’t bear to solve.”   -Roger Kornberg

“The scientist has in common with the artists only this: that he can find no better retreat from the world and also no stronger link with the world than his work.”   -Max Delbruck.