Life Is A Partial, Continuous, Progressive, Multiform

Men Will Not Be Content To Manufacture Life: They Will Want To Improve On It.

In Science Men Have Learned Consciously To Subordinate Themselves To A Common Purpose Without Losing The Individuality Of Their Achievements. Each One Knows That His Work Depends On That Of His Predecessors And Colleagues, And That It Can Only Reach Its Fruition Through The Work Of His Successors. In Science Men Collaborate Not Because They Are Forced To By Superior Authority Or Because They Blindly Follow Some Chosen Leader, But Because They Realize That Only In This Willing Collaboration Can Each Man Find His Goal.

In My Own Field, X-ray Crystallography, We Used To Work Out The Structure Of Minerals By Various Dodges Which We Never Bothered To Write Down, We Just Used Them. Then Linus Pauling Came Along To The Laboratory, Saw What We Were Doing And Wrote Out What We Now Call Pauling's Rules. We Had All Been Using Pauling's Rules For About Three Or Four Years Before Pauling Told Us What The Rules Were.

The Question Of The Origin Of Life Is Essentially Speculative. We Have To Construct, By Straightforward Thinking On The Basis Of Very Few Factual Observations, A Plausible And Self-consistent Picture Of A Process Which Must Have Occurred Before Any Of The Forms Which Are Known To Us In The Fossil Record Could Have Existed.

The Beauty Of Life Is, Therefore, Geometrical Beauty Of A Type That Plato Would Have Much Appreciated.