Arthur Kornberg Quotations

Nothing worthwhile is ever fun.

Thou shalt not believe something just because you can explain it.

Half of what we know is wrong, the purpose of science is to determine which half.

I feel now, as we did then, that for an effective approach to the problem of nucleic acid biosynthesis, it was essential to understand the biosynthesis of the simple nucleotides and the coenzymes and to have these concepts and methodology well in hand.

The pursuit of curiosity about the basic facts of nature has proven, with few exceptions throughout the history of medical science, to be the route by which the successful drugs and devices of modern medicine were discovered.

Without advances, medicine regresses and reverts to witchcraft.

DNA, like a tape recording, carries a message in which there are specific instructions for a job to be done.

No matter how counter-intuitive it may seem, basic research has proven over and over to be the lifeline of practical advances in medicine.

As in biomedical science, pioneering industrial inventions have not been mothered by necessity. Rather, inventions for which there was no commercial use only later became the commercial airplanes, xerography and lasers on which modern society depends.

According to physical measurements, DNA chains are, on the average, 10,000 units long.

Analysis of the composition of samples of DNA from a great variety of sources and by many investigators revealed the remarkable fact that the purine content always equals the pyrimidine content.