Tim Hunt Quotes

If you wanted to dissect the structure of living cells, genetic analysis was an extremely powerful method, so my interest turned to that.

In 2008, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for work done on a molecule called green fluorescent protein that was isolated from the bioluminescent chemistry of a jellyfish, and it's been equated to the invention of the microscope in terms of the impact that it has had on cell biology and genetic engineering.

It's so hard to figure out what's going on in biological systems. You just can't see them.

When I was in high school, I became interested in cytochemistry: chemical analysis under the microscope, and trying to understand the composition of cells.

Attempts have been made from a study of the changes produced by mutation to obtain the relative order of the bases within various triplets, but my own view is that these are premature until there is more extensive and more reliable data on the composition of the triplets.

By the time I was 12 or 13, I was studying biochemistry textbooks.

But honestly, if you do a rigorous survey of my work, I'll bet you'll find that biology is a theme far more often than physical science.

I have a Ph.D. in cell biology. And that's really manual labor. I mean, experimental science, you do it with your hands. So it's very different. You're out there in a lab, cleaning test tubes, and it just wasn't that fascinating.

For a decade, I had been studying a transparent worm, the C. elegans. I immediately thought, if you could put the G.F.P. gene into C. elegans, you'd then be able to see biological processes in live animals. Until then, we had to kill them and prepare their tissues chemically to visualize proteins or active genes within cells.

Studying organisms at a molecular level was totally compelling because it was moving from being a naturalist, which was the 19th-century kind of science, to being very focused and really getting to the heart of these molecules.

Life is the division of human cells, a process which begins at conception.

If you want to study one of these strange organisms, you had better have a good justification. It's not good to study gene organisation in some obscure insect that no one's ever heard about.

I am not a scientist. I have never analyzed the far reaches of the solar system through the lens of a telescope nor scrutinized cancer cells under a microscope.

The research I have been doing - studying how foodstuffs yield energy in living cells - does not lead to the kind of knowledge that can be expected to give immediate practical benefits to mankind. If I have chosen this field of study, it was because I believed in its importance in spite of its theoretical character.

I began studying ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow in Peter Moore's laboratory in 1978.

Today we try to identify a gene and then study its properties.

The microscopic world became my obsession.

For my part, I would say that the male sperm and seeds of plants have been penetrated so far that there is nothing further to discover in this great secret, but I could err in my opinion.

The process of the body changing and making a whole human fascinates me.

Well, we can study aging in people, but of course those studies take decades. So what we try to do is we use simpler organisms to try and understand the basic mechanisms and so in my laboratory, for example, we use things like simple baker's yeast that we use to make bread.

I've wanted to write a book on embryology, that extraordinary journey where you start off as a single cell and end up with a human body, for a general audience for years.

most people prefer to carry out the kinds of experiments that allow the scientist to feel that he is in full control of the situation rather than surrendering himself to the situation, as one must in studying human beings as they actually live.

I have found the study of organisms to be a truly exciting experience, always interesting and sometimes humbling.

I didn't know then what a sperm was, and so wouldn't understand his answer for several years. "My boy," he said, "you are descended from a long line of determined, resourceful, microscopic tadpoles-- champions every one.

You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I'm talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells.