Erwin Chargaff famous quotes

04-17-2025

One of the most insidious and nefarious properties of scientific models is their tendency to take over, and sometimes supplant, reality.
-- Erwin Chargaff

#Science #Reality #Sometimes
If you can modify a cell, it's only a short step to modifying a mouse, and if you can modify a mouse, it's only a step to modifying a higher animal, even man.
-- Erwin Chargaff

#Animal #Men #Cells
Molecular biology is essentially the practice of biochemistry without a license.
-- Erwin Chargaff

#Practice #Molecular Biology #Biology
Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question 'How?' but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question 'Why?'
-- Erwin Chargaff

#Confused #Science #Answers
You can stop splitting the atom; you can stop visiting the moon; you can stop using aerosols; you may even decide not to kill entire populations by the use of a few bombs. But you cannot recall a new form of life.
-- Erwin Chargaff

#Moon #Population #Atoms
The modern version of Buridan's ***** [a figurative description of a man of indecision] has a Ph.D., but no time to grow up as he is undecided between making a Leonardo da Vinci in the test tube or planting a Coca Cola sign on Mars.
-- Erwin Chargaff

#Growing Up #Men #Ass
When the so-called think tanks began to replace the thought processes of human beings, I called them the aseptic tanks.
-- Erwin Chargaff

#Thinking
There are no such men today. We have created a mechanism that makes it practically impossible for a real genius to appear. In my own field the biochemist Fritz Lipmann or the much maligned Linus Pauling were very talented people. But generally, geniuses everywhere seem to have died out by 1914. Today, most are mediocrities blown up by the winds of the time.
-- Erwin Chargaff

#Real #Men #Wind
He [said of one or other eminent colleagues] is a very busy man, and half of what he publishes is true, but I don't know which half.
-- Erwin Chargaff

#Truth #Men #Half
Outside his own ever-narrowing field of specialization, a scientist is a layman. What members of an academy of science have in common is a certain form of semiparasitic living.
-- Erwin Chargaff

#Fields #Common #Scientist
The narrow slit through which the scientist, if he wants to be successful, must view nature constructs, if this goes on for a long time, his entire character; and, more often than not, he ends up becoming what the German language so appropriately calls a Fachidiot (professional idiot).
-- Erwin Chargaff

#Character #Successful #Science
If at one time or another I have brushed a few colleagues the wrong way, I must apologize: I had not realized that they were covered with fur.
-- Erwin Chargaff

#Science #Men #Fur
There is no question in my mind that we live in one of the truly ***** centuries in human history. There are plenty of signposts for the future historian, and what do they say? They say 'Auschwitz' and 'Dresden' and 'Hiroshima' and 'Vietnam' and 'Napalm.' For many years we all woke up to the daily body count on the radio. And if there were a way to kill people with the B Minor Mass, the Pentagon-Madison Avenue axis would have found it.
-- Erwin Chargaff

#Death #Science #Years
The results serve to disprove the tetranucleotide hypothesis. It is, however, noteworthy-whether this is more than accidental, cannot yet be said-that in all desoxypentose nucleic acids examined thus far the molar ratios of total purines to total pyrimidines, and also of adenine to thymine and of guanine to cytosine, were not far from 1.
-- Erwin Chargaff

#Dna #Ratios #Acid
Life is the continuing intervention of the inexplicable.
-- Erwin Chargaff

#Life Is #Inexplicable #Continuing
Scientific fashions last longer than women's fashions but not as long as men's
-- Erwin Chargaff

#Fashion #Men #Long
Science is now the craft of the manipulation, substitution and deflection of the forces of nature. What I see coming is a gigantic slaughterhouse, an Auschwitz, in which valuable enzymes, hormones, and so on will be extracted instead of gold teeth.
-- Erwin Chargaff

#Gold #Manipulation #Teeth

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