James D. Watson

“I have been much blessed.”

“Spotting a rare bird is never worth the bite of a cur. Once bitten by a German shepherd, I knew that I preferred cats, even if they are bird-killers. Life is long enough for more than one chance at a rare bird.”

“I don't want 100 different cures of cancer. I want, you know, give me five. So if you had, you know, five medicines, you could do away with 90 percent of cancer. That's sort of my objective. I think we're going to do it.”

“I started doing science when I was effectively 20, a graduate student of Salvador Luria at Indiana University. And that was - you know, it took me about two years, you know, being a graduate student with Luria deciding I wanted to find the structure of DNA; that is, DNA was going to be my objective.”

“If you succeed with your first dream, it helps. You know, people trust you, possibly, for the second one. They give you a chance to play out your second one.”

“Our goal should be to understand our differences.”

“I had become monomaniacal about DNA only in 1951 when I had just turned 23 and as a postdoctoral fellow was temporarily in Naples attending a small May meeting on biologically important macromolecules.”