CHAPTER 10 



A Few Remarks on Nucleic Acids, Decoding, and 

 the Rest of the World * 



Men naar Contexten er bleven meningsl0s, saa hjcelper det 

 ikke med store Overskuelser, saa gj^r man bedst i at tage 

 Talens enkelte Dele frem; naar Munden slaaer Sladdcr, saa 

 hjcelper det ikke at ville holde et sammenhcengende Fore- 

 drag, men man gj0r bedst i at tage hvert Ord for sig** 



KIERKEGAARD | EN LITERAIR ANMELDELSE | p. 115 



One of our great men is reported to have said: When in doubt 

 tell the truth. This is an excellent and not much followed precept. 

 But our science has not been in doubt for quite some time. It 

 has learned that it is profitable to outsmart nature. 



Many of us, when we were young, thought that it was the task 

 of the natural scientist to understand the ways of nature. But it 

 has come about in our times that what man desires — or at any 

 rate what some men desire — is to change these ways. It all started 

 as a search for truth; but hundreds of thousands, at Hiroshima, 

 at Nagasaki, paid with their lives for such lovable inquisitiveness. 

 What an ivory, what a tower! 



So I have learned to watch these clever fingers closely and not 

 to beheve the song of the sirens, even if they are sirens with a 

 Ph.D. When they tell me: "As soon as we have mastered the 

 genetic code, we shall know how to cure cancer", my answer is: 

 "Maybe; but before this, you will probably succeed in converting 

 humanity into a bunch of mongoloid idiots, by putting just the 

 right amount of base analogues into the DNA". 



* This is the text of a lecture given, in a much abbreviated form, at a 

 symposium on "Basic Problems in Neoplastic Disease" held at Columbia 

 University on March 12, 1962. 



** But when the context has become meaningless, grandiose surveys 

 are of no use; it is best to bring out the individual parts of the speech. 

 When the mouth only babbles, it is of no use to undertake a coherent 

 lecture; it is best to take each word in itself. 



