George C. Williams Quotes

In the seventeenth century, it was held by some that inside a human sperm there was a minute human being - a homunculus - that was planted inside the womb. Development consisted of the miniature homunculus enlarging and passing through birth and on to maturity-just like inflating a balloon.

I didn't know how babies were made until I was pregnant with my fourth child.

When we anthropomorphize the egg and sperm, when we turn them into a miniature bride and groom complete with personalities, what effect does this have on abortion legislation?

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.

Man is developed from an ovule, about 125th of an inch in diameter, which differs in no respect from the ovules of other animals.

Human reproduction can be a sticky subject—” “Ewww!” groaned a chorus of students

A million million spermatozoa, All of them alive: Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah Dare hope to survive.

Although each egg cell produced by a woman carries a single X chromosome, the sperm cells produced by a man carry either an X or a Y. This means, in very simple terms, that the sperm cell determines a baby's sex.

In principle. what is done is to take the nucleus out of a cell with a very fine micro-pipette or needle and introduce it into an egg. That had been done with amphibians a long time ago, and then there was a long pause of many years before people were clever enough to make that work in the sheep.

The Life at Conception Act legislatively declares what most Americans believe and what science has long known - that human life begins at the moment of conception and, therefore, is entitled to legal protection from that point forward.

We haven't been able yet to determine in terms of genes what makes a human being a human and not another mammal.

From the beginning, each human embryo has its own unique genetic identity.

As with most animal eggs, the early events of amphibian development are largely independent of the environment, and the processes leading to cell differentiation must involve a redistribution and interaction of constituents already present in the fertilized egg.

The idea was to study fertilization in as many different phyla and organisms as possible, using the simplest possible equipment and a microscope. Biochemical approaches were not much in vogue, and running gels impossible at first.

Biology is far from understanding exactly how a single cell develops into a baby, but research suggests that human development can ultimately be explained in terms of biochemistry and molecular biology. Most scientists would make a similar statement about evolution.

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

Even with seemingly simple things like eye color, you can't tell from my genetic code whether I have blue eyes or not. So it's naive to think that complex human behaviors, like risk-seeking, are driven by changes in one or two genes.

It's no mistake that the moment of impregnation is called conception: at first, parenthood is nothing more than an idea.

I wonder if most people ever ask themselves why love is connected with reproduction. And if they do ask themselves about this, I wonder what answer they give.

I spent 10 years trying to find one gene.

Now an embryo may seem like some scientific or laboratory term, but in fact the embryo contains the unique information that defines a person. All you add is food and climate control, and some time, and the embryo becomes you or me.

Heredity provides for the modification of its own machinery.

The importance of the egg's non-nuclear material - the cytoplasm - in early development is apparent in the consistent relation that is seen to exist between certain regions in the cytoplasm of a fertilized egg and certain kinds or directions of cell differentiation.

In the immortal germ line of human beings - that is, the eggs that sit in the ovaries - they actually sit there in a state of suspended animation for up to 50 years in the life of each woman.

Almost nothing is known from hybridization studies about the inheritance of courtship behavior of females, or of their responsiveness to particular male signals.