When you start in science, you are brainwashed into believing how careful you must be, and how difficult it is to discover things. There's something that might be called the 'graduate student syndrome'; graduate students hardly believe they can make a discovery.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the challenges and self-doubt faced by graduate students in science, emphasizing the rigorous training that makes discovery seem daunting.
Francis Crick reflects on the initial experiences of graduate students in science, noting that the pressure to be meticulous can lead to a sense of inadequacy. This 'graduate student syndrome' creates a barrier to believing in their own potential to make meaningful discoveries, suggesting that the rigorous expectations can stifle creativity and confidence in their abilities. Crick's observation encourages a shift in mindset, advocating for a belief in one's capacity for innovation despite the challenges of scientific learning.
In practice
In a university lecture on the struggles of graduate students.
One can say, looking at the papers in this symposium, that the elucidation of the genetic code is indeed a great achievement. It is, in a sense, the key to molecular biology because it shows how the great polymer languages, the nucleic acid language and the protein language, are linked together.
Exact knowledge is the enemy of vitalism.
A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong
It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.
To produce a really good biological theory one must try to see through the clutter produced by evolution to the basic mechanisms lying beneath them, realizing that they are likely to be overlaid by other, secondary mechanisms. What seems to physicists to be a hopelessly complicated process may have been what nature found simplest, because nature could only build on what was already there.
It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.
The central difficulty lies in the fact that all of the sciences have made such great progress during the last century that they have got quite beyond the reach of man
Any difficulties which the world faces today will be as nothing compared to the full effects which global warming will have on the world-wide economy.
Even before string theory, especially as physics developed in the 20th century, it turned out that the equations that really work in describing nature with the most generality and the greatest simplicity are very elegant and subtle.
Time travel and teleportation will have to wait. It may take centuries to master these technology. But within the coming decades, we will understand dark matter, perhaps test string theory, find planets which can harbor life, and maybe have Brain 2.0, i.e. our consciousness on a disk which will survive even after we die.
To me quantum computation is a new and deeper and better way to understand the laws of physics, and hence understanding physical reality as a whole.
I think that the discovery of antimatter was perhaps the biggest jump of all the big jumps in physics in our century.
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