“I met George Beadle in 1957, when I arrived at CalTech as a new graduate student in the Division of Biology. I had been offered a teaching assistantship to support my first year of study, but the offer did not specify the course I would be teaching. As it turned out, I was assigned to the team of teaching assistants (TAs) in Bio 1, the introductory biology course in which George Beadle and James Bonner were the lecturers. I had, of course, heard of both Beadle and Bonner before I arrived at CalTech, and I was pleased to be given an assignment that would give me an opportunity to get to know them.

I want to mention Beadle's introduction to his lecture on evolution, because it differed so dramatically from the introduction that I had heard when I was a freshman biology student. My professor at Washington University had started the lecture by saying that the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church, to which many of the students in the class belonged, rejected the idea of evolution. “When the church and science are in conflict on some issue,” said the professor, “the church had better back down.” This statement made a good many students extremely unhappy. Beadle, on the other hand, introduced the subject by saying that some religious people were uncomfortable with the theory of evolution, but he did not see why. If you wanted to think of god as the creator of all living things, what would be wrong with thinking that god used evolution as the mechanism? It was clear that Beadle was no more religious than my professor at Washington University, but he was certainly more diplomatic.”

“I see no conflict between science and religion. The answer to the question of creation still remains in the realm of faith. In early biblical times, it was believed as a matter of faith that man was created as man. Since then, science has led us back in such a way that there is no logical place to stop, until we come to a primeval universe made of hydrogen. But then we ask, ‘whence came the hydrogen?’ and science has no answer. Is it any less awe-inspiring to conceive of a universe created of hydrogen with the capacity to evolve into man than it is to accept the creation of man as man? I believe not.”

— George Beadle (1962), “Address at the Chicago Sunday Evening Club” (to Christian layman), Chicago, Mar 18

“You too can win Nobel Prizes. Study diligently. Respect DNA. Don’t smoke. Don’t drink. Avoid women and politics. That’s my formula.”

— George Beadle (c.1970) (Ѻ)