Biophysicist

🇺🇸James Watson

Science

1928–2025

"If you can't be criticized, that's very dangerous."

🇺🇸Thomas Gold

Science

1920–2004

"A theorist can explain any correlation, and its inverse."

🇬🇧Dorothy Hodgkin

Science

1910–1994

"Would it not be better if one could really 'see' whether molecules...were just as experiments suggested?"

"Based on the virus genome and properties, there is no indication whatsoever that it was an engineered virus."

🇦🇹Eric Kandel

Medicine

b. 1929

"Because we do not have a sensory organ dedicated to space, the representation of space is a quintessentially cognitive sensibility: it is the binding problem writ large."

🇺🇸John Stapp

Medicine

1910–1999

"The universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human accomplishment an incredible miracle."

🇭🇺Georg von Békésy

Science

1899–1972

"It is not the things that we have, but how we use them that is important."

🇩🇪Bernard Katz

Medicine

1911–2003

"Organized religion: The world's largest pyramid scheme."

🇦🇹Max Perutz

Science

1914–2002

"Could the search for ultimate truth really have revealed so hideous and visceral looking an object?"

"The problem is essentially that of communications to an army in action. After a rapid advance communications become disorganized, and there is a temporary halting until they are again in working order."

"Jesus does not give us a discourse on the nature of the universe, he gives us a set of active verbs. And yet what better discourse on the real nature of the universe could there be?"

🇬🇧Aaron Klug

Science

1926–2018

"People who get Nobel prizes aren't necessarily the most imaginative of people. People who sometimes find a system, develop a system, do very useful work."

🇬🇧Andrew Huxley

Science

1917–2012

"I am very conscious that there is no scientific explanation for the fact that we are conscious."

🇬🇧Rosalind Franklin

Science

1920–1958

"What’s the use of doing all this work if we don't get some fun out of this?"

🇺🇸Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Science

b. 1952

"Dr. Ramakrishnan addressing an audience of 3,000 at the university’s Centenary Auditorium."

🇺🇸Stuart Kauffman

Science

b. 1939

"It is not necessary that a specific set of 2000 enzymes be assembled... Whenever a collection of chemicals contains enough different kinds of molecules, a metabolism will crystallize from the broth."

🇺🇸Rosalyn Sussman Yalow

Medicine

1921–2011

"Initially, new ideas are rejected. Later they become dogma, if you’re right. And if you’re really lucky you can publish your rejections as part of your Nobel presentation."

🇺🇸Mary Ruwart

Literature

b. 1949

"We reap as we sow. In trying to control others, we find ourselves controlled. In failing to honor our neighbor's choice, we create a world of poverty and strife."

🇬🇧Francis Crick

Literature

1916–2004

"Both of us had decided, quite independently of each other, that the central problem in molecular biology was the chemical structure of the gene."

🇺🇸Linus Pauling

Science

atheism

1901–1994

"If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away."