James D. Watson
I have an odd theory on happiness, and it bothers people. My general theory is that happiness is a reward for an animal doing what it should be doing. So if a horse runs, it feels happy. Or if you are too thin, you can't be happy, because evolution wants you to be tense and anxious, trying to wake up in the morning looking for food.
An idea can be tested, whereas if you have no idea, nothing can be tested and you don't understand anything. The molecule that you make when you are getting sunburned or when you eat a lot of food is part of the same molecule that contains an endorphin or an opiate. No one has ever had a hypothesis about why the two are together.
I've had strong opinions probably since I was born. It makes you unpopular, but what can you do?
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.
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 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.
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 wish there would be more movies about scientists.
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.
Knowing "why" (an idea) is more important than learning "what" (the fact).Collection: Ideas
The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. The brain boggles the mind.Collection: Cells
Remember, grab you're future with both hands and mold it into what you want it to be. It's the determined, who create the life they want, while the idle sit by and watch it fade away into nothingness. The future belongs to the exceptional individuals, who can see the light of the future, at the end of the tunnel.Collection: Motivational
Do things as soon as you can. If a decision needs to be made, make it. It gives you more time to change your mind.Collection: Giving
Nothing new that is really interesting comes without collaborationCollection: Education
Never be the brightest person in the room.Collection: Rooms
There is only one science, physics: everything else is social work.Collection: Social Work
One of the greatest gifts science has brought to the world is continuing elimination of the supernatural.Collection: Religion
No one may have the guts to say this, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we?Collection: Knowing
One of the greatest gifts science has brought to the world is continuing elimination of the supernatural, and it was a lesson that my father passed on to me, that knowledge liberates mankind from superstition. We can live our lives without the constant fear that we have offended this or that deity who must be placated by incantation or sacrifice, or that we are at the mercy of devils or the Fates. With increasing knowledge, the intellectual darkness that surrounds us is illuminated and we learn more of the beauty and wonder of the natural world.Collection: Father
If scientists don't play God, who will?Collection: Play
Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you're not going to hire them.Collection: People
There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.Collection: Humanity
I turned against the left wing because they don't like genetics, because genetics implies that sometimes in life we fail because we have bad genes. They want all failure in life to be due to the evil system.Collection: Wings
The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don't have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to understand.Collection: Believe
The way to do great science is to stay away from subjects that are overpopulated, and go to the frontiers.Collection: Way
People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.Collection: Girl
A goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.Collection: Stupid
Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours. 5Collection: God
The brain, is the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe.Collection: Brain
I don't think we are here for anything. We're just products of evolution. You can say, "Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose." But I'm anticipating a good lunch.Collection: Thinking
I'm basically a libertarian. I don't want to restrict anyone from doing anything unless it's going to harm me. I don't want [to] pass a law stopping someone from smoking. It's just too dangerous. You lose the concept of a free society. Since we are genetically so diverse and our brains are so different, we're going to have different aspirations.Collection: Law
Science that leads over the horizon depends on gathering the best minds and enabling them to do what the best minds naturally seek to do: pursue the most thrilling questions of the time.Collection: Mind
Science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders. Instead, its steps forward (and sometimes backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles.Collection: Play
I recently went to my staircase at Clare College, Cambridge and there were women there! There have been a lot of convincing studies recently about the loss of productivity in the Western male. It may be that entertainment culture now is so engaging that it keeps people satisfied. We didn't have that. Science was much more fun than listening to the radio. When you are 16 or 17 and in that inherently semi-lonely period when you are deciding whether to be an intellectual, many now don't bother.Collection: Lonely
Already for thirty-five years he had not stopped talking and almost nothing of fundamental value had emerged.Collection: Science
At lunch Francis [Crick] winged into the Eagle to tell everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life.Collection: Distance
For all my life, America was the place to be. And we somehow continue to be the place where there are real opportunities to change the world for the better.Collection: Real
Moving forward will not be for the faint of heart. But if the next century witnesses failure, let it be because our science is not yet up to the job, not because we don't have the courage to make less random the sometimes most unfair courses of human evolution.Collection: Jobs
[As a young man ] I came to the conclusion that the church was just a bunch of fascists that supported Franco. I stopped going on Sunday mornings and watched the birds with my father instead.Collection: Morning
Racists have often used pseudoscience to justify their socially damaging views; watch these films to see how science, by replacing ignorance with knowledge, can undo that damage.Collection: Ignorance
(The National Cancer Program is) a bunch of (obscenity).Collection: Cancer
If I had been married earlier in life, I wouldn't have seen the double helix. I would have been taking care of the kids on Saturday. On the other hand, I was lonely a lot of the time.Collection: Lonely
The American public is being sold a very nasty bill of goods about cancer.Collection: Cancer
Polls consistently show that the majority of Americans favour research using embryonic stem cells and yet politicians continue to pander to the outspoken religious minority that is hampering efforts to develop this potentially valuable technology.Collection: Religious
If we don't play God, who will?Collection: Play
No good model ever accounted for all the facts, since some data was bound to be misleading if not plain wrong.Collection: Data