131 Quotes by James D. Watson

If we don't play God, who will?

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.

I think the reason people are dealing with science less well now than 50 years ago is that it has become so complicated.

I never dreamed that in my lifetime my own genome would be sequenced.

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.

If scientists don't play God, who will?

I wanted to see if I could write a good book.

The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don't have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to understand.

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.