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Erwin Chargaff

Erwin Chargaff Books

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“A scientific autobiography belongs to a most awkward literary genre. If the difficulties facing a man trying to record his life are great - and few have overcome them successfully - they are compounded in the case of scientists, of whom many lead monotonous and uneventful lives and who, besides, often do not know how to write . . .”

IfsKnowsMenWritingTryingCasesKnow HowRecordsScientistOvercomingDifficultyGenreAwkwardAutobiographyMonotonousLiterary Genre
Book:Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature
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“There are no such men today. We have created a mechanism that makes it practically impossible for a real genius to appear. In my own field the biochemist Fritz Lipmann or the much maligned Linus Pauling were very talented people. But generally, geniuses everywhere seem to have died out by 1914. Today, most are mediocrities blown up by the winds of the time.”

PeopleMenRealSeemsTodayMy OwnImpossibleFieldsWindGeniusDiedMediocrityMechanismReal Genius
Author:Erwin Chargaff
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“The results serve to disprove the tetranucleotide hypothesis. It is, however, noteworthy-whether this is more than accidental, cannot yet be said-that in all desoxypentose nucleic acids examined thus far the molar ratios of total purines to total pyrimidines, and also of adenine to thymine and of guanine to cytosine, were not far from 1.”

SaidResultsDnaHypothesisAcidRatios
Book:Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life Before Nature
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“There is no question in my mind that we live in one of the truly bestial centuries in human history. There are plenty of signposts for the future historian, and what do they say? They say 'Auschwitz' and 'Dresden' and 'Hiroshima' and 'Vietnam' and 'Napalm.' For many years we all woke up to the daily body count on the radio. And if there were a way to kill people with the B Minor Mass, the Pentagon-Madison Avenue axis would have found it.”

PeopleIfsWayYearsMindHumansBodyScienceDeathFoundCenturyMassRadioPlentyHistorianVietnamMinorsHuman HistoryAvenuesPentagonMadisonAxesAuschwitzHiroshimaDresdenSignpostsMadison AvenueNapalm
Book:Voices in the labyrinth: nature, man, and science
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