James D. Watson Quotes

The moment I saw the model and heard about the complementing base pairs I realized that it was the key to understanding all the problems in biology we had found intractable - it was the birth of molecular biology.

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.

Physical studies of DNA had, of course, been under way for some years before analysis of virus particles began.

In the 1970s, I did a Ph.D. with Fred Sanger in Cambridge who was in the process of inventing ways to map what's inside DNA. He later won the Nobel Prize.

So that's when I saw the DNA model for the first time, in the Cavendish, and that's when I saw that this was it. And in a flash you just knew that this was very fundamental.

DNA is the master blueprint for life and constitutes the genetic material in all free-living organisms and most viruses. RNA is the genetic material of certain viruses, but it is also found in all living cells, where it plays an important role in certain processes such as the making of proteins.

In this atmosphere I soon became interested in nucleic acids.

I began studying ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow in Peter Moore's laboratory in 1978.

By then, I was making the slow transition from classical biochemistry to molecular biology and becoming increasingly preoccupied with how genes act and how proteins are made.

You'd need a very specialized electron microscope to get down to the level to actually see a single strand of DNA.

When I began playing around at being a physical chemist, I enjoyed very much doing work on the structure of DNA molecules, something which I would never have dreamed of doing before I started.

Natural DNA is a tractless coil, like an unwound and tangled audiotape on the floor of the car in the dark.

Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas.

Nucleic acids are the main information-carrying molecules of the cell, and, by directing the process of protein synthesis, they determine the inherited characteristics of every living thing. The two main classes of nucleic acids are deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA).

And indeed this theme has been at the centre of all my research since 1943, both because of its intrinsic fascination and my conviction that a knowledge of sequences could contribute much to our understanding of living matter.

Biology - DNA - is technology. It is coding. It is physical coding, but still code.

Molecular biology is essentially the practice of biochemistry without a license.

DNA is an abbreviation for deoxyribonucleicantidisestablishmentarianism, a complex string of syllables.

We are, in a way, temporary ambulatory repositories for our nucleic acids. This does not deny our humanity; it does not prevent us from pursuing the good, the true and the beautiful. But it would be a great mistake to ignore where we have come from in our attempt to determine where we are going.

It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.

We have come a long way on that old molecule DNA.

By the time I was 12 or 13, I was studying biochemistry textbooks.

I was a close observer of the developments in molecular biology.

According to physical measurements, DNA chains are, on the average, 10,000 units long.

How is the base sequence, divided into codons? There is nothing in the backbone of the nucleic acid, which is perfectly regular, to show us how to group the bases into codons.