Top 93 James D. Watson Quotes
#1. It's necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant.
James D. Watson
#2. 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.
James D. Watson
#3. 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.
James D. Watson
#5. 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.
James D. Watson
#6. 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.
James D. Watson
#7. Science has always been my preoccupation and when you think a breakthrough is possible, it is terribly exciting.
James D. Watson
#9. 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.
James D. Watson
#10. I've had strong opinions probably since I was born. It makes you unpopular, but what can you do?
James D. Watson
#11. Nothing new that is really interesting comes without collaboration
James D. Watson
#13. 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.
James D. Watson
#14. 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.
James D. Watson
#15. We're not all equal, it's simply not true. That isn't science.
James D. Watson
#16. On the other hand, the sun of Naples might be conducive to learning something about the biochemistry of the embryonic development of marine animals.
James D. Watson
#18. It is no coincidence that so many religious beliefs date back to times when no science could possibly have accounted satisfactorily for many of the natural phenomena inspiring scripture and myths.
James D. Watson
#19. I never dreamed that in my lifetime my own genome would be sequenced.
James D. Watson
#20. 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.
James D. Watson
#21. (The National Cancer Program is) a bunch of (obscenity).
James D. Watson
#22. People say we are playing God. My answer is: If we don't play God, who will?
James D. Watson
#23. 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.
James D. Watson
#24. 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.
James D. Watson
#25. You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient.
James D. Watson
#26. 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.
James D. Watson
#27. 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.
James D. Watson
#30. At lunch Francis winged into the Eagle to tell everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life.
James D. Watson
#31. My heroes were never scientists. They were Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood, you know, good writers.
James D. Watson
#32. Knowing "why" (an idea) is more important than learning "what" (the fact).
James D. Watson
#33. I think the reason people are dealing with science less well now than 50 years ago is that it has become so complicated.
James D. Watson
#34. 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.
James D. Watson
#35. Take young researchers, put them together in virtual seclusion, give them an unprecedented degree of freedom and turn up the pressure by fostering competitiveness.
James D. Watson
#36. 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.
James D. Watson
#37. The American public is being sold a very nasty bill of goods about cancer.
James D. Watson
#38. 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.
James D. Watson
#39. The brain, is the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe.
James D. Watson
#40. Some think there is something wrong about enhancing people.
James D. Watson
#42. 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.
James D. Watson
#43. I was always very curious about what a scientist's life was like when I was young. Of course, when I was young, you didn't have very many opportunities to find out with no web, TV. I was very lucky: I was born in the city of Chicago and went to the University of Chicago where I actually saw things.
James D. Watson
#44. One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that , in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.
James D. Watson
#45. 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 ...
James D. Watson
#46. 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.
James D. Watson
#47. 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.
James D. Watson
#48. 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.
James D. Watson
#49. The time has come to seriously ask whether antioxidant use much more likely causes than prevents cancer.
James D. Watson
#50. 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.
James D. Watson
#51. One-third of all female infertility is the result of blocked fallopian tubes. If fertilization could be done in the lab and then the fertilized egg implanted in the womb, it would get around that problem. Millions of women who cannot have children would suddenly be able to.
James D. Watson
#53. DNA was my only gold rush. I regarded DNA as worth a gold rush.
James D. Watson
#54. People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.
James D. Watson
#55. I first became aware of Charles Darwin and evolution while still a schoolboy growing up in Chicago. My father and I had a passion for bird-watching, and when the snow or the rain kept me indoors, I read his bird books and learned about evolution.
James D. Watson
#56. Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you're not going to hire them.
James D. Watson
#57. Spotting a rare bird is never worth the bite of a cur. Once bitten by a German shepherd, I knew that I preferred cats, even if they are bird-killers. Life is long enough for more than one chance at a rare bird.
James D. Watson
#59. 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.
James D. Watson
#60. 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.
James D. Watson
#61. There is only one science, physics: everything else is social work.
James D. Watson
#62. 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.
James D. Watson
#63. 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.
James D. Watson
#64. [When asked by a student if he believes in any gods]
Oh, no. Absolutely not ... The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don't have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to understand.
James D. Watson
#65. Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.
James D. Watson
#66. 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.
James D. Watson
#67. '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.
James D. Watson
#68. If you accept that people are the products of evolution, then you have to have an open mind to the truth. Unfair discrimination exists whether we like it or not; I wouldn't have married a gum-chewing vegetarian.
James D. Watson
#69. You move forward through knowledge. You prevail through knowledge. I love the word 'prevail.' Prevail!
James D. Watson
#70. No good model ever accounted for all the facts, since some data was bound to be misleading if not plain wrong.
James D. Watson
#72. The way to do great science is to stay away from subjects that are overpopulated, and go to the frontiers.
James D. Watson
#74. Most academic battles involve space or faculty appointments and promotions.
James D. Watson
#75. Already for thirty-five years he had not stopped talking and almost nothing of fundamental value had emerged.
James D. Watson
#77. 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.
James D. Watson
#78. As an educator, I have always striven to see that the fruits of the American Dream are available to all.
James D. Watson
#80. 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.
James D. Watson
#81. 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.
James D. Watson
#82. 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.
James D. Watson
#83. 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.
James D. Watson
#84. A clone of Einstein wouldn't be stupid, but he wouldn't necessarily be any genius, either.
James D. Watson
#85. 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.
James D. Watson
#86. I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood. Perhaps in other company he is that way, but I have never had reason so to judge him.
James D. Watson
#87. [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.
James D. Watson
#89. 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.
James D. Watson
#90. I want to see cancer cured in my lifetime. It might be.
James D. Watson
#91. 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.
James D. Watson
#92. 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.
James D. Watson
#93. Here at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, we have genetically rearranged various viruses and bacteria as part of our medical research. In fact, we have been able to create entirely new types of DNA molecules by splicing together the genetic information from different organisms - recombinant DNA.
James D. Watson
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