Erwin Chargaff Quotes

d. 2002 Austria

Erwin Chargaff (August 11, 1905 – June 20, 2002) was an Austrian biochemist who emigrated to the United States during the Nazi era. Through careful experimentation, Chargaff discovered two rules that helped lead to the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.

Austria
Scientists

Random Erwin Chargaff quote

5 quotes

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.

Perspectives in Biology and Medicine (1973)

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.

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.

Letter to the editor of Science (1976)

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

Attributed

Unangenehme Seher werden meistens als Narren abgeschrieben [Visionaries of uncomfortable truths are mostly dismissed as fools]

Attributed

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Erwin Chargaff (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.