Hans Fischer Quotes

The more the relationships of the nitrogen-rich substances to the cell nucleus were recognized, the more the question of the arrangement of the nitrogen and carbon atoms in the molecule came to stand out.

It has been recognized that hydrogen bonds restrain protein molecules to their native configurations, and I believe that as the methods of structural chemistry are further applied to physiological problems it will be found that the significance of the hydrogen bond for physiology is greater than that of any other single structural feature.

Ultimately, biological phenomena involve molecules, and understanding them involves understanding the underlying chemistry. In my opinion, this is a particularly exciting area of chemistry.

One day I discovered that one could get the barrier to internal rotation in ethane approximately right using this method. This was the beginning of my work on organic molecules.

Chemistry, until my childhood, not that long ago, was regarded as a calculating device. Because you couldn't reduce to physics. So it's just some way of calculating the result of experiments. The Bohr atom was treated that way.

The detailed geometry of the coenzyme molecule as a whole is fascinating in its complexity.

Coproporphyrin in particular is widespread; traces are present in normal urine and also in yeast. In special cultures, yeast can be made to produce considerable quantities of coproporphyrin.

Biochemistry is the science of life. All our life processes - walking, talking, moving, feeding - are essentially chemical reactions. So biochemistry is actually the chemistry of life, and it's supremely interesting.

The most common and most important result of them is that the nature and size of the effect on corresponding series of different elements are largely an expression of the peculiarity of their atomic structure - or, at least, of the structure of the surface.

Much of my work in biology has been driven by my early training in chemistry. When studying a new chemical compound, the first and most important thing is to determine its detailed molecular structure.

Molecular chemistry, the chemistry of the covalent bond, is concerned with uncovering and mastering the rules that govern the structures, properties and transformations of molecular species.

Organic compounds exist in which a hydrogen atom, joined to the carbon, acquires acid properties as a result of the proximity of certain functional groupings.

The blood pigment haemoglobin is a compound which can be split by diverse methods into its constituents, pigment and protein.

Molecules A and B meet, marry, and beget the species. This takes place in one-millionth of a billionth of a second. This is a fundamental process in nature, and the world was looking for a way to be able to see the process. But many brilliant people said it couldn't be done.

It's nice to be able to look at one protein, but life is driven by the interactions between proteins, so it's really essential to be able to see multiple proteins at a time to understand these interactions.

As can be seen even by this limited number of examples proteins carry out amazingly diverse functions.

This simple idea served to provide information on the geometrical shape of reacting molecules, and I was able to make the role of the frontier orbitals in chemical reactions more distinct through visualization, by drawing their diagrams.

Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties.

X-Ray crystallography is nowadays an accurate and rapid method of determining conformation in the crystal lattice, which conformation usually corresponds to the preferred conformation in solution.

With this in mind, for some twenty years I have set myself as my particular task the experimental investigation of the connexion between change in the structure and change in the spectra of chemical atoms.

Few scientists acquainted with the chemistry of biological systems at the molecular level can avoid being inspired.

This led to the discovery that long chain fatty acids would remarkably stabilize serum albumin to heat denaturation, and would even reverse the denaturation by heat or concentrated urea solutions.

The basic structure of proteins is quite simple: they are formed by hooking together in a chain discrete subunits called amino acids.

This work made me more and more interested in biological matter, and I decided that I really wanted to work on the X-ray analysis of biological molecules.

Even when they are saturated in the sense of the older theory of valence, the elementary atoms still possess sufficient chemical affinity to bind other seemingly also saturated atoms and groups of atoms, under generation of clearly defined atomic bonds.