Top 40 James D. Watson Quotes

I think the reason people are dealing with science less well now than 50 years ago is that it has become so complicated.

Take young researchers, put them together in virtual seclusion, give them an unprecedented degree of freedom and turn up the pressure by fostering competitiveness.

Great wealth could make an enormous difference over the next decade if they sensibly support the scientific elite. Just the elite. Because the elite makes most of the progress. You should worry about people who produce really novel inventions, not pedantic hacks.

I want to see cancer cured in my lifetime. It might be.

I have been much blessed.

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.

‘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.

We should govern our actions by assuming that people are more good than bad. Whereas, most of our social policies dictate that people are more bad than good. That you know if you do something, it’ll be seized by the rich to exploit the poor.

Science moves with the spirit of an adventure characterized both by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty.

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.

I do think one success of Northern Europe, which the United States came from, was its willingness to accept innovation in business practices like Adam Smith and the whole Enlightenment. It essentially made the merchant class free instead of controlled by the king and aristocracy. That was essential.

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.

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.

The time has come to seriously ask whether antioxidant use much more likely causes than prevents cancer.

You’ve never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient.

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.

I wish there would be more movies about scientists.

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.

Biology has at least 50 more interesting years.

The pace of discovery is going unbelievably fast.

We’re not all equal, it’s simply not true. That isn’t science.

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.

I am thrilled to see my genome.

DNA was my only gold rush. I regarded DNA as worth a gold rush.

By the age of 11, I was no longer going to Sunday Mass, and going on birdwatching walks with my father. So early on, I heard of Charles Darwin. I guess, you know, he was the big hero. And, you know, you understand life as it now exists through evolution.

I’ve had strong opinions probably since I was born. It makes you unpopular, but what can you do?

It’s so difficult writing about living people.

Ultimately, we’ll help the people we discriminate against if we try to understand more about them; genetics will lead to a world where there is a sympathy for the underdog.

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.

I don’t want 100 different cures of cancer. I want, you know, give me five. So if you had, you know, five medicines, you could do away with 90 percent of cancer. That’s sort of my objective. I think we’re going to do it.

It is extraordinary the extent to which Darwin’s insights not only changed his contemporaries’ view of the world but also continue to be a source of great intellectual stimulation for scientists and nonscientists alike.

As an educator, I have always striven to see that the fruits of the American Dream are available to all.

I wanted to see if I could write a good book.

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.

To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologise unreservedly.

I never wanted to be liked by the majority of people, but there were always some people that I desperately wanted to be liked by. And so you’ve got to behave in a way that… the way I put it is that if you want to be a real intellectual, you’ve got to have someone to save you.

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.

My wife and I have a schizophrenic son. We didn’t want to accept this for 30 years, so we put him under great pressure when we shouldn’t have. He just wanted to be looked after, and we didn’t respect that. We tried to make him independent.

I have a son, who is a… not an ordinary form of schizophrenia, but clearly, cannot take care of himself. And the great fear of then, of all parents is, when the parents die, who takes care of your child? And the answer is: they become homeless.

I would only once have the opportunity to let my scientific career encompass a path from the double helix to the three billion steps of the human genome.