“Some may smile and may feel that this is but a new version of the old dream of the perfection of man. It is that, but it is something more. The old dreams of the cultural perfections of man were al...”

“As the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane had described it in 1923, once the power to control genes had been harnessed, "no beliefs, no values, no institutions are safe.”

“The rediscovery of Mendel's laws of heredity in the opening weeks of the 20th century sparked a scientific quest to understand the nature and content of genetic information that has propelled biolo...”

“When power is discovered, man always turns to it," Bateson wrote darkly. "The science of heredity will soon provide power on stupendous scale; and in some country, at some time not, perhaps, far di...”

“Phenotype, in short, drags genotypes behind it, like a cart pulling a horse. It is the perennial conundrum of natural selection that it seeks one thing (fitness) and accidentally finds another (gen...”

“Muller was catapulted into the international fame by his discovery. The effect of radiation on the mutation rate in flies had two immediate implications. First, genes had to be made of matter. Radi...”

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettie...”

“To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth. ”

“The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.”