Science Quote by Francis Crick

Crick is doing something he rarely gets credit for: persuading without grandstanding. The sentence is built like a lab bench argument, not a manifesto. He starts with a procedural claim - the “same components” and the “same inhibitors” as protein synthesis - then pivots to a probabilistic judgment. That “thus” is a quiet flex of scientific rhetoric: if two processes share the same dependencies and vulnerabilities, you don’t need to romanticize them as “life-like”; you can treat them as mechanistically entangled.

The key word is “artefact,” and it’s a period piece. Mid-century molecular biology was haunted by the fear that experimental systems were manufacturing illusions: effects produced by the method rather than the organism. Crick’s intent is to draw a bright line between a convenient model and a misleading one. He’s not claiming proof; he’s staking out credibility. “Most unlikely” and “very probably” are hedges, but they’re also discipline. He’s demonstrating a posture of inference: strong enough to move a field forward, cautious enough to survive peer skepticism.

Subtextually, he’s training readers in how to trust evidence. Shared inhibitors are a kind of cross-examination; they imply common machinery. In an era when the central dogma was being assembled piece by piece, that mattered. The quote captures the moment when biology stopped being descriptive and became operational: you believe a process is “genuine” when you can break it in the same way you break the real thing. That’s Crick’s broader cultural move - replacing authority with mechanism, and replacing certainty with calibrated confidence.