DISCUSSION 
Szent-Gyorgyt: I just want to wash my hands of vitalism: 
even if we don’t need any new sciences, quantum mechanics 
will have to be greatly refined to be adequate for the analysis 
of most biological phenomena. At the moment, it is a very 
crude science which works with extremely inadequate methods. - 
If I ask a physicist to calculate the jump of an electron from one 
level to another, he will need a few months, and a great number 
of computers, yet that electron makes the jump without com- 
puters and never misses. Maybe we need no new sciences and 
only have to perfect our present sciences very much. I would 
just remind you of the odd particles which physicists don’t 
know what to do with. There is some very basic unknown law 
behind all this, so our knowledge must still be very incomplete. 
Crick: ‘The important thing you have to ask at each level is, 
do you understand it? It is perfectly true that we do not 
understand all quantum phenomena. What is interesting about 
molecular biology is that we can explain an enormous amount of 
it without knowing any quantum mechanics whatsoever. It 
is only for a few things like photosynthesis that you need to know 
quantum mechanics. 
Szent-Gydrgyt: ‘The function of a co-enzyme cannot be ex- 
plained without quantum mechanics. 
Crick: That is perfectly true when you get down to the 
chemical details, but from the point of view of vitalism we know 
that the same chemical reactions will go on in the test-tube in a 
very simple environment. It is not that there is anything 
mysterious or magical about it: it is simply that we don’t 
understand chemistry to that degree of precision. But we can 
study the co-enzyme by chemical methods, and describe it by 
chemical methods, and then we can apply those to the biological 
context. You are asking that chemistry should be explained in 
terms of physics, whereas we are saying that one can explain 
biology in terms of physics and chemistry more easily than one 
would expect, although the step from physics to chemistry is 
rather difficult. 
Szent-Gyérgyi: I disagree with that. You are mixing up two 
things. It is easy to reproduce a process, but that doesn’t mean 
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