I've edited together a book on cancer viruses; the lab will punish - not punish, publish it.- James Watson

[To biologists], physicists are rather like consultants: they appear without being asked and don't tell you anything new.
- Physicist Dirk Brockmann of Max-Planck Institute for Dynamic and Self-Organization, quoting his fellow biologists' words on physicists interesting in biology.

"If everyone you talk to says you shouldn't do something, you probably shouldn't do it, and if everyone says you should do something, you should also probably not do it; but if half the people you talk to tell you to do it and half say you're crazy, then youshould definitely go ahead."
-Seymour Benzer, talking about his decison to study animal's behavior using fruit fly as a model organis. (added 1/11/2008)

The Human Genome Project, which Jim led in its early years, has had one bad—one might say, boring—consequence in generating factory science that I have called “low input, high throughput, no output” biology.
--Sydney Brenner, commenting on James Watson's new book 'Avoid boring people'.