Erwin Chargaff Quotes

Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question “how?” but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question “why?

Life is the continuing intervention of the inexplicable.

If at one time or another I have brushed a few colleagues the wrong way, I must apologize: I had not realized that they were covered with fur.

Scientific fashions last longer than women's fashions but not as long as men's

You can stop splitting the atom; you can stop visiting the Moon; you can stop using aerosols; you may even decide not to kill entire populations by the use of a few bombs. But you cannot recall a new form of life. —Erwin Chargaff

It is the sense of mystery that, in my opinion, drives the true scientist; the same force, blindly seeing, deafly hearing, unconsciously remembering, that drives the larva into the butterfly. If he has not experienced, at least a few times in his life, this cold shudder down his spine, this confrontation with an immense, invisible face whose breath moves him to tears, he is not a scientist. The blacker the night, the brighter the light.

If Herostratos has earned immortality for having burned down the temple of Artemis in Ephesos, maybe the man from whom he got the matches ought not to be entirely forgotten.

The stress on mechanisms has given rise to one of the curses of our time: the expert. It has made body mechanics out of physicians and cell mechanics out of biologists; and if the philosopher cannot yet be called a brain mechanic, this is only a sign of his backwardness.

There exist mysterious links between language and the human brain; and the heartless and brutal way in which language is used in our times, as if it were only a power tool in public relations, a shortcut from sly producer to gullible consumer, has always seemed to me the most threatening portent of incipient bestialization. It is frightening to observe that a progressive aphasia, not organically determined, appears to overtake large numbers of people who seem to be unable to express themselves except by hoarse barks and expletives. The gift of tongues, not explainable on the basis of natural selection, is the true attribute of humanization; and it is only fitting that it be revoked shortly before the tails begin to grow.

what about Erwin Chargaff’s tantalising match of the base ratios, A = T and C = G? Is this just another of nature’s coincidences? Or is it a vital clue that will somehow make sense of the whole sorry mess?

Heraclitean Fire by Erwin Chargaff,