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.
I think that by creating a world of plenty, by creating institutions and organizations that promote knowledge and promote understanding, I think I could be part of being in a better world.
I have the same sense of the power and virtue of knowledge that some people get from a religious background.
Until 1943 I received no stipend. I was able to support myself as my mother was the daughter of a relatively wealthy cotton manufacturer.
Real invention is a process of repeated, crushing failure that leads, very rarely, to a success. If you want to succeed faster, there's nothing for it but to fail faster and better.
At every stage of my career I have had interesting and cordial colleagues, some of whom are close friends.
People are not the only interesting organism on earth. From the point of view of scientific or commercial value, there are lots of interesting organisms.
If fruit juices or sugar solutions are left to stand in the open air, they show after a few days the processes which are covered by the name of fermentation phenomena.
We allowed ourselves to become particularly interested in research into the appearance of intermediate products of sugar decomposition during cell-free fermentation.
Science, as long as it limits itself to the descriptive study of the laws of nature, has no moral or ethical quality and this applies to the physical as well as the biological sciences.
In the earlier years when I started this project at Stanford University, everyone told me it was nuts to go and try to reproduce the mysterious complexities that occur in a whole cell.
One of the major lessons in all of biochemistry, cell biology and molecular medicine is that when proteins operate at the sub cellular level, they behave in a certain way as if they're mechanical machinery.
In Darwin's time all of biology was a black box: not only the cell, or the eye, or digestion, or immunity, but every biological structure and function because, ultimately, no one could explain how biological processes occurred.
Originally, the burden of proof was on physicists to prove that time travel was possible. Now the burden of proof is on physicists to prove there must be a law forbidding time travel.
Moreover, the concern of some that moving DNA among species would breach customary breeding barriers and have profound effects on natural evolutionary processes has substantially disappeared as the science revealed that such exchanges occur in nature...
About seven years later I was given a book about the periodic table of the elements. For the first time I saw the elegance of scientific theory and its predictive power.
I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.
If I may take the liberty to speak for science at least, today his name and his prizes are without a peer in the world. He not only elevates science but he influences it as well.
You cannot create new science unless you realize where the old science leaves off and new science begins, and science fiction forces us to confront this.
What are we promoting in society? Well-behaved automatons that spew back what they learned in a book. That's not science. You can get a parrot to do that.
