Anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants
— Jacques Monod (1954)
… I can’t be as confident about computer science as I can about biology. Biology easily has 500 years of exciting problems to work on. It’s at that level.
— Donald E. Knuth (1993)
If we hope to understand biology, instead of looking at one little protein at a time, which is not how biology works, we will need to understand the integration of thousands of proteins in a dynamically changing environment.
— Craig Venter
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
— Donald E. Knuth
Life is a relationship between molecules not a property of any one molecule. So is therefore disease which endangers life. While there are molecular diseases, there are no diseased molecules…
— Emile Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling (1962), Molecular disease, evolution and genic heterogeneity, Horizons in Biochemistry, New York Academic Press, Inc. 1962, pp. 189–225.
Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.
— George E. P. Box, Norman Richard Draper (1987), Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces. Wiley. p. 424. ISBN 0471810339
What could be more important than the study of life, to any intelligent being who has the good fortune to be alive?
— Isaac Asimov
Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric revels the organization of the entire tapestry.
— Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, ISBN 0679601279, p.28
Science is knowledge which we understand so well that we can teach it to a computer; and if we don’t fully understand something, it is an art to deal with it. We should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.
— Donald E. Knuth, 1974 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM 17 (12), (December 1974), pp. 667–673
I have deeply regretted that i did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics; for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense.
— Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (1887)