Erwin Chargaff quotes

Erwin Chargaff was an Austrian-American biochemist best known for discovering key rules about the composition of DNA. His research on nucleic acids laid the foundation for understanding the structure and function of genetic material. He significantly influenced the discovery of the DNA double helix and the development of molecular biology. Here are 7 of his quotes:

Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question 'How?' but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question 'Why?'

Erwin Chargaff

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.

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

In 1945, therefore, I proved a sentimental fool; and Mr. Truman could safely have classified me among the whimpering idiots he did not wish admitted to the presidential office. For I felt that no man has the right to decree so much suffering, and that science, in providing and sharpening the knife and in upholding the ram, had incurred a guilt of which it will never get rid. It was at that time that the nexus between science and murder became clear to me. For several years after the somber event, between 1947 and 1952, I tried desperately to find a position in what then appeared to me as a bucolic Switzerland,-but I had no success.

Erwin Chargaff

We do not know what life is, and yet we manipulate it as if it were an inorganic salt solution...

Erwin Chargaff

Visionaries of uncomfortable truths are mostly dismissed as fools.

Erwin Chargaff