Asa Gray Quotes

I was driven completely by a desire to understand how cells worked.

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

Living organisms are created by chemistry. We are huge packages of chemicals.

In basic research, the use of the electron microscope has revealed to us the complex universe of the cell, the basic unit of life.

Proteins are the machinery of living tissue that builds the structures and carries out the chemical reactions necessary for life.

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.

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

We are seeing the cells of plants and animals more and more clearly as chemical factories, where the various products are manufactured in separate workshops.

I became aware of the very complex internal organization in a cell from the basic science classes, and it made me think about how all that could work. It seemed like a great mystery, especially how organelles in the cell can be arranged in three dimensions, and how thousands of proteins could find their way to the right location in the cells.

Owing to the difficulty of dealing with substances of high molecular weight we are still a long way from having determined the chemical characteristics and the constitution of proteins, which are regarded as the principal con-stituents of living organisms.

Our cells engage in protein production, and many of those proteins are enzymes responsible for the chemistry of life.

Medicine is no longer looking at organs. It looks at the processes inside the cell.

I think you can say that life is a system in which proteins and nucleic acids interact in ways that allow the structure to grow and reproduce. It's that growth and reproduction, the ability to make more of yourself, that's important.

After returning from Cambridge in 1936, I did some work with J. M. Mioz on the oxidation of fatty acids in liver.

The structure of many cellular macromolecules has been revealed at the atomic level using x-ray crystallography.

I knew the lysosomes and peroxisomes because I had discovered them; I knew the mitochondria because I was interested in them. I knew the membrane system because my friend, George Palade, had worked on that.

A living cell requires energy not only for all its functions, but also for the maintenance of its structure.

At the end of the 1970s, I was a young researcher at the Weizmann Institute with an ambitious plan to shed light on one of the major outstanding questions concerning living cells: the process of protein biosynthesis.

The internal machinery of life, the chemistry of the parts, is something beautiful. And it turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life.

But while doing that I'd been following a variety of fields in science and technology, including the work in molecular biology, genetic engineering, and so forth.

The more we understand what happens in living cells, the more incredibly powerful you realize things can be when they work from the bottom up, by interaction of one molecule and another.

The properties which differentiate living matter from any kind of inorganic imitation may be instinctively felt, but can hardly be formulated without expert knowledge.

The excitement of vitamins, nutrition and metabolism permeated the environment.

I remember being in strong physics, physiology and biology classes.

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