A Busy Life Is A Wasted Life.

Protein Synthesis Is A Central Problem For The Whole Of Biology, And That It Is In All Probability Closely Related To Gene Action.

It Is Not Easy To Convey, Unless One Has Experienced It, The Dramatic Feeling Of Sudden Enlightenment That Floods The Mind When The Right Idea Finally Clicks Into Place. One Immediately Sees How Many Previously Puzzling Facts Are Neatly Explained By The New Hypothesis. One Could Kick Oneself For Not Having The Idea Earlier, It Now Seems So Obvious. Yet Before, Everything Was In A Fog.

The Major Credit I Think Jim And I Deserve ... Is For Selecting The Right Problem And Sticking To It. It's True That By Blundering About We Stumbled On Gold, But The Fact Remains That We Were Looking For Gold. Both Of Us Had Decided, Quite Independently Of Each Other, That The Central Problem In Molecular Biology Was The Chemical Structure Of The Gene. ... We Could Not See What The Answer Was, But We Considered It So Important That We Were Determined To Think About It Long And Hard, From Any Relevant Point Of View.

A Busy Life Is A Wasted Life.

If Watson And I Had Not Discovered The [dna] Structure, Instead Of Being Revealed With A Flourish It Would Have Trickled Out And That Its Impact Would Have Been Far Less. For This Sort Of Reason Stent Had Argued That A Scientific Discovery Is More Akin To A Work Of Art Than Is Generally Admitted. Style, He Argues, Is As Important As Content. I Am Not Completely Convinced By This Argument, At Least In This Case.