lp15a Chargaff, Erwin

"In retrospect: a commentary by Erwin Chargaff on 'Studies on the structure of ribonucleic acids'", Bioch. Biophy. Acta 1000: 15-16, 1989

"...But in the last twenty-five years...biochemistry has been made into the handmaiden of the new and ill-defined science of molecular biology of which it is not easy to say in what, if anything, its practitioners are trained thoroughly.....Those would still accept the jocular definition that I proposed many years ago: Molecular Biology is the practice of biochemistry without a licence.

...This shift has had the consequence that a great number of valid biochemical problems are no longer pursued, since, considered as unfashionable, they are not funded. It is regrettable that philosophers, historians and sociologists of science rarely look at the budget. Twenty morons at the right places can kill a science." (from p.16 column 1 and 2).