François Jacob

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”