Francis Crick Quotes

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.

Genes themselves are made of bits.

The nucleic acids have considerable biological importance because of their role in cell growth and in the transmission of hereditary characters.

The genome was once thought to be just the blueprint for a living organism, like a combination of the architect's plan for a building and the builder's list of supplies. It specified the parts, the building blocks, and, somehow, the design of the whole, the way in which they are to be put together.

Genetics is about how information is stored and transmitted between generations.

Every cell in your body contains the same genetic information.

You can't have life without the genetic code.

In this atmosphere I soon became interested in nucleic acids.

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).

Genes are like the story, and DNA is the language that the story is written in.

It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.

All life is nucleic acid; the rest is commentary.

I have this idea of trying to catalog all the genes on the planet.

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.

Genes are natural resources.

The human genome contains so much data that, it has been calculated, it would fill 43 volumes of Webster's International Dictionary.

Nuclear DNA encodes all the proteins and enzymes that make you you, basically.

It would appear that the number of nonsense triplets is rather low, since we only occasionally come across them. However this conclusion is less secure than our other deductions about the general nature of the genetic code.

Genes that underlie the capacity to receive, use and transmit information are the evolving properties.

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, like a tape recording, carries a message in which there are specific instructions for a job to be done.

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

The genome could be thought of as a kind of piano with twenty-five thousand keys. In some cases, a few keys may be out of tune, which can cause the music to sound wrong. In others, if one key goes dead the music turns into a cacophony, or the whole piano self-destructs.

Life is a DNA software system.

Our understanding of how DNA informs our health and development is advancing at an incredible pace.