Erwin Chargaff - Collected Quotes

"Great concepts require great names." (Erwin Chargaff, "Essays on Nucleic Acids", 1963)

"When a science approaches the frontiers of its knowledge, it seeks refuge in allegory or in analogy." (Erwin Chargaff, "Essays on Nucleic Acids", 1963)

"What counts, however, in science is to be not so much the first as the last." (Erwin Chargaff, "Preface to a Grammar of Biology", Science Vol. 172 (3984), 1971)

"There is no real popularization [of science] possible, only vulgarization that in most instances distorts the discoveries beyond recognition." (Erwin Chargaff, "Bitter Fruits from the Tree of Knowledge", Perspectives in Biology and Medicine Vol. 16, 1973)

"[…] in most sciences the question Why? is forbidden and the answer is actually to the question, How? Science is much better in explaining than in understanding, but it likes to mistake one for the other." (Erwin Chargaff, "Voices in the Labyrinth", Perspectives in Biology and Medicine Vol. 18, 1975)

"The sciences have started to swell. Their philosophical basis has never been very strong. Starting as modest probing operations to unravel the works of God in the world, to follow its traces in nature, they were driven gradually to ever more gigantic generalizations. Since the pieces of the giant puzzle never seemed to fi t together perfectly, subsets of smaller, more homogeneous puzzles had to be constructed, in each of which the fi t was better." (Erwin Chargaff, "Voices in the Labyrinth", Perspectives in Biology and Medicine VII Vol. 18, 1975)

"Science has become an eye without a head, a desperate attempt to fill holes with gaps. It came up to a lock, so it looked for the key; but it was a lock without a keyhole. The priests of truth are soiled with blood; their discoveries have become inventions, their pledges far from eternal. In a science in which one can say: "this is no longer true," nothing is true." (Erwin Chargaff, "Voices in the Labyrinth: Nature, Man and Science Chimaera", 1977)

"The so-called exact sciences often are not as exact as is commonly believed. How often they infer the existence of a hat from the emergence of a rabbit!" (Erwin Chargaff, "Voices in the Labyrinth: Nature, Man and Science", 1977)

"To the scientist nature is like a mirror that breaks every thirty years; and who cares about the broken glass of past times?" (Erwin Chargaff, "Voices in the Labyrinth: Nature, Man and Science", 1977)

"In science we always know much less than we believe we do." (Erwin Chargaff, "Uncertainties Great, Is the Gain Worth the Risk?", Chemical and Engineering News, 1977)

"It is the sense of mystery that, in my opinion, drives the true scientist: the same force, blindly seeing, deafly hearing, unconsciously remembering, that drive the larvae 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." (Erwin Chargaff, "Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature", 1978)

"The availability of a large number of established methods serves in modern science often as a surrogate of thought." (Erwin Chargaff , "Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature", 1978)

"The initial incommunicability of truth, scientific or otherwise, shows that we think in grooves, and that it is painful for us to be torn away from the womblike security of accepted concepts." (Erwin Chargaff, "Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature", 1978)

"To be a pioneer in science has lost much of its attraction: significant scientific facts and, even more, fruitful scientific concepts pale into oblivion long before their potential value has been utilized. New facts, new concepts keep crowding in and are in turn, within a year or two, displaced by even newer ones. [...] Now, however, in our miserable scientific mass society, nearly all discoveries are born dead; papers are tokens in a power game, evanescent reflections on the screen of a spectator sport, news items that do not outlive the day on which they appeared." (Erwin Chargaff, "Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature", 1978)