One of the most insidious and nefarious properties of scientific models is their tendency to take over, and sometimes supplant, reality.

Erwin Chargaff

Life is the continuing intervention of the inexplicable.

Erwin Chargaff

Science is now the craft of the manipulation, substitution and deflection of the forces of nature.

Erwin Chargaff

You can stop splitting the atom; you can stop visiting the moon; you can stop using aerosols; you may even decide not to kill entire populations by the use of a few bombs. But you cannot recall a new form of life.

Erwin Chargaff

If you can modify a cell, it's only a short step to modifying a mouse, and if you can modify a mouse, it's only a step to modifying a higher animal, even man.

Erwin Chargaff

Outside his own ever-narrowing field of specialization, a scientist is a layman. What members of an academy of science have in common is a certain form of semiparasitic living.

Erwin Chargaff

Molecular biology is essentially the practice of biochemistry without a license.

Erwin Chargaff

The modern version of Buridan's ass [a figurative description of a man of indecision] has a Ph.D., but no time to grow up as he is undecided between making a Leonardo da Vinci in the test tube or planting a Coca Cola sign on Mars.

Erwin Chargaff

Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question 'How?' but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question 'Why?'

Erwin Chargaff

The narrow slit through which the scientist, if he wants to be successful, must view nature constructs, if this goes on for a long time, his entire character; and, more often than not.

Erwin Chargaff

We manipulate nature as if we were stuffing an Alsatian goose. We create new forms of energy; we make new elements; we kill crops; we wash brains. I can hear them in the dark sharpening their lasers.

Erwin Chargaff

When the so-called think tanks began to replace the thought processes of human beings, I called them the aseptic tanks.

Erwin Chargaff