“Now one could say, at the risk of some superficiality, that there exist principally two types of scientists. The ones, and they are rare, wish to understand the world, to know nature; the others, far more frequent, wish to explain it. The first are searching for truth, often with knowledge that they will not attain it; the second strive for plausibility, for the achievement of an intellectually consistent, and hence successful, view of the world.”
“Outside his own ever-narrowing field of specialization, a scientist is a layman. What members of an academy of science have in common is a certain form of semiparasitic living.”
Erwin Chargaff
“What I see coming is a gigantic slaughterhouse, a molecular Auschwitz, in which valuable enzymes, hormones, and so on will be extracted instead of gold teeth.”
Erwin Chargaff
“We do not know what life is, and yet we manipulate it as if it were an inorganic salt solution...”
Erwin Chargaff
“Unangenehme Seher werden meistens als Narren abgeschrieben [Visionaries of uncomfortable truths are mostly dismissed as fools]”
Erwin Chargaff
“Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question 'How?' but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question 'Why?'”
Erwin Chargaff
