40 Quotes by Sydney Brenner

I spent 20 years sharing an office with Francis Crick and many new and exciting ideas (both right and wrong) were generated from our conversations.

I immediately began to read about bacterial viruses and in October 1952 I arrived in Oxford to do a Ph.D. in the Physical Chemistry Laboratory.

In my final year I failed Medicine, scraped through Surgery but got a First Class in the third subject, Obstetrics and Gynecology.

It is now widely realized that nearly all the 'classical' problems of molecular biology have either been solved or will be solved in the next decade. The entry of large numbers of American and other biochemists into the field will ensure that all the chemical details of replication and transcription will be elucidated. Because of this, I have long felt that the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other fields of biology, notably development and the nervous system.

I think one of the things about creativity is not to be afraid of saying the wrong thing.

Have you tried neuroxing papers? It.'s a very easy and cheap process. You hold the page in front of your eyes and you let it go through there into the brain. It's much better than xeroxing.

As was predicted at the beginning of the Human Genome Project, getting the sequence will be the easy part as only technical issues are involved. The hard part will be finding out what it means, because this poses intellectual problems of how to understand the participation of the genes in the functions of living cells.

Progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, probably in that order.

Innovation comes only from an assault on the unknown.