Cell Function Quotes

In my second year, after moving to the Medical School, I began the courses of Anatomy and Physiology. I had begun to see that I was interested in cells and their functions.

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.

Most of our brain cells are glial cells, once thought to be mere support cells, but now understood as having a critical role in brain function. Glial cells in the human brain are markedly different from glial cells in other brains, suggesting that they may be important in the evolution of brain function.

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

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

There are thousands of proteins in the cells, some of them very large chains of molecules. And the cell doesn't function if one of those chains of molecules isn't there, and you start looking at the complexity of life and the mystery of life, and then start thinking about things like the twenty universal constants, that if any one of them from Plank's minimum to the mass of a proton, if one of them is the tiniest bit off, there would be no life or possibility of it in the universe.

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.

Every cell in our body is primarily water. But the water doesn't just sit in the cell, it moves through it in a very organized way. The process occurs rapidly in tissues that have these aquaporins or water channels.

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

There are over 7,000 different types of proteins in typical eukaryotic cells; the total number depends on the cell class and function.

Without energy life would be extinguished instantaneously, and the cellular fabric would collapse.

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

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

It is the cells which create and maintain in us, during the span of our lives, our will to live and survive, to search and experiment, and to struggle.

As long as we do not know how the cell works, we don't know the kind of havoc the AIDS virus creates in the cell.

Moreover the incorporation requires the same components needed for protein synthesis, and is inhibited by the same inhibitors. Thus the system is most unlikely to be a complete artefact and is very probably closely related to genuine protein synthesis.

We know specific genes are turned on in specific cells, but we don't know to what extent this happens.

If you go back to the first single-cell form of life, it clearly possessed the capacity to receive, to utilize, to store, to transform, and to transmit information.

Protein synthesis is a central problem for the whole of biology, and that it is in all probability closely related to gene action.

Nature - how, we don't know - has technology that works in every living cell and that depends on every atom being precisely in the right spot. Enzymes are precise down to the last atom. They're molecules. You put the last atom in, and it's done. Nature does things with molecular perfection.

One of the central mysteries of biology is why the genome is largely identical from cell to cell, even though cells do different things.

The living cell almost always contains, locked in its interior, the visible or invisible products of its physiological activity or its nourishment.

Every cell in your body contains the same genetic information.

I am interested in how cells know what they are and how they should behave in their proper place in the body.

I try to think up material that might apply to the subjects they are studying. How many mitochondria does it take to power a cell? One. Because mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. Not ready for prime time, that one.