Biological Systems Quotes

[A living organism] ... feeds upon negative entropy ... Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness (= fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.

Eventually we'll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.

The human brain, then, is the most complicated organization of matter that we know.

Man himself is a mysterious object, and the tools to probe his physiologic nature and function have developed only slowly through the millennia.

Since natural selection requires a function to select, an irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would have to arise as an integrated unit for natural selection to have anything to act on.

But the prospects of designing chemical plants for industrial scale chemical processes seemed far less interesting than the chemical events that occur in biological systems.

I thought in my Nobel Lecture I pointed that I was delighted that the Swedish Academy of Science did not quote anything about my current work right now, because the current work that my group is focusing on is actually both the time resolve electrons and possibly x-rays to be able to get the architecture of these molecules, the molecular structures themselves, of very complex biological systems. That's the ultimate goal.

There is no true understanding of Biology without Chemistry. And there's no true understanding of Chemistry without Physics.

As soon as you go into any biological process in any real detail, you discover it's open-ended in terms of what needs to be found out about it.

True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.

The major thing is to view biology as an information science.

Nature never uses prime numbers. But mathematicians do.

My father was a physicist, while I am a biogeochemist. I live to study plants, and he has never had more than a generic interest in biology.

Man, like other organisms, is so perfectly coordinated that he may easily forget, whether awake or asleep, that he is a colony of cells in action, and that it is the cells which achieve, through him, what he has the illusion of accomplishing himself.

Molecular chirality plays a key role in science and technology. In particular, life depends on molecular chirality in that many biological functions are inherently dissymmetric.

Biology is the most powerful technology ever created. DNA is software, protein are hardware, cells are factories.

The human body is the most complex system ever created. The more we learn about it, the more appreciation we have about what a rich system it is.

Water is commonly regarded as the 'solvent of life,' since our bodies are 70% water. All other vertebrates, invertebrates, microbes, and plants are also primarily water. The organization of water within biological compartments is fundamental to life, and the aquaporins serve as the plumbing systems for cells.

Physiology is concerned with all those phenomena of life that present them selves to us in sense perception as bodily processes, and accordingly form part of that total environment which we name the external world.

The wealth of the nation is its air, water, soil, forests, minerals, rivers, lakes, oceans, scenic beauty, wildlife habitats and biodiversity... that's all there is. That's the whole economy. That's where all the economic activity and jobs come from. These biological systems are the sustaining wealth of the world.

Is the human race a universal constructor?

Life is a relationship among molecules and not a property of any molecule.

What is the nature of the genetic endowment? How does acquisition proceed? Etc. Scientists do routinely ask similar questions about the visual system, system of motor organisation, and others - including, in fact, the digestive system.

Our massive tampering with the world's interdependent web of life—coupled with the environmental damage inflicted by deforestation, species loss, and climate change—could trigger widespread adverse effects, including unpredictable collapses of critical biological systems whose interactions and dynamics we only imperfectly understand. Uncertainty over the extent of these effects cannot excuse complacency or delay in facing the threats.

Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium.