It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.
Interpretation
Understanding our brains helps us comprehend our existence in the universe.
Francis Crick emphasizes the importance of studying our brains to better understand our role and significance in the vast and intricate universe. He suggests that by exploring the complexities of our minds, we can gain insight into our place within the greater cosmos and the nature of our existence.
In practice
In a lecture about neuroscience and its impact on our understanding of the universe, this quote can emphasize the interconnectedness of mind and cosmos.
One can say, looking at the papers in this symposium, that the elucidation of the genetic code is indeed a great achievement. It is, in a sense, the key to molecular biology because it shows how the great polymer languages, the nucleic acid language and the protein language, are linked together.
Exact knowledge is the enemy of vitalism.
A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong
To produce a really good biological theory one must try to see through the clutter produced by evolution to the basic mechanisms lying beneath them, realizing that they are likely to be overlaid by other, secondary mechanisms. What seems to physicists to be a hopelessly complicated process may have been what nature found simplest, because nature could only build on what was already there.
It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.
In the fullness of time, educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death.
In summoning even the wisest of physicians to our aid, it is probably that he is relying upon a scientific "truth", the error of which will become obvious in just a few years' time.
The fundamental principle of science, the definition almost, is this: the _x000D_ sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment.
Hunger is actually the worst weapon of mass destruction. It claims millions of victims each year.
The art of doing science is doing the important things first.
[About the great synthesis of atomic physics in the 1920s:] It was a heroic time. It was not the doing of any one man; it involved the collaboration of scores of scientists from many different lands. But from the first to last the deeply creative, subtle and critical spirit of Niels Bohr guided, restrained, deepened and finally transmuted the enterprise.
For me, it was my first cosmic connection, on par with a first kiss. No other planet looks as unworldly or surreal as Saturn. When you see it floating in the eyepiece of your telescope, you feel as if you've uncovered mystery in the cosmos.
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