François Jacob

“The dream of every cell is to become two cells.”

“It is evolution, and not a divine creator, that is the tinkerer.”

“What is true for E. coli is true for the elephant.”

“The world of the possible is vast, much vaster than the world of the real.”

“Day-dreaming is a way of creating systems of the world.”

“Contrary to what I once thought, scientific progress did not consist simply in observing... It consisted in creating with one's imagination a possible world, and then seeing if that possible world corresponded to the real one.”

“Myths and science fulfill a similar function: they both provide human beings with a representation of the world and of the forces that are supposed to govern it.”

“Evolution does not produce novelties from scratch. It works on what already exists.”

“An organism is a machine, but a machine of a very peculiar kind. It is a machine that constructs itself.”