Cell Signaling Quotes

Cancer cells come pre-programmed to execute a well-defined cascade of changes, seemingly designed to facilitate both their enhanced survival and their dissemination through the bloodstream. There is even an air of conspiracy in the way that tumours use chemical signals to create cancer-friendly niches in remote organs.

Every thought, feeling, and emotion creates a molecule known as a neuropeptide. Neuropeptides travel throughout your body and hook onto receptor sites of cells and neurons. Your brain takes in the information, converts it into chemicals, and lets your whole body know if there's trouble in the world or cause for celebration. Your body is directly influenced as these molecules course through the bloodstream, delivering the energetic effect of whatever your brain is thinking and feeling.

In my lab, we are always thinking about how cells, bacterial cells, can talk to each other and then organize themselves into enormous groups that function in unison.

The language of God is not English or Latin; the language of God is cellular and molecular.

The body and dendrites of a nerve cell are specialized for the reception and integration of information which is conveyed as impulses that are fired from other nerve cells along their axons.

A human body is a conversation going on, both within the cells and between the cells, and they're telling each other to grow and to die; when you're sick, something's gone wrong with that conversation.

A risk-free life is far from being a healthy life. To begin with, the very word "risk" implies worry, and people who worry about every bite of food, sip of water, the air they breathe, the gym sessions they have missed, and the minutiae of vitamin doses are not sending positive signals to their cells. A stressful day sends constant negative messaging to the feedback loop and popping a vitamin pill or choosing whole wheat bread instead of white bread does close to zero to change that.

Because of the relationship between programmed cell death and human disease, the identification of the genes and proteins that function in the process of programmed cell death has provided new targets for possible intervention in a broad diversity of disorders.

Calling on each molecule one by one? No way. I just told all of them to be quiet - except for a selected few.

A key issue in developmental biology at that time was the problem of how cells underwent differentiation, with most workers concentrating on explanations in terms of changes in enzyme and gene regulation.

The ideal way to study the property of different types of neurons is to control individual types of cells independently and see what happens when you alter one type of cell. Optogenetics helps to realize this goal.

It is now widely realized that nearly all the 'classical' problems of molecular biology have either been solved or will be solved in the next decade. The entry of large numbers of American and other biochemists into the field will ensure that all the chemical details of replication and transcription will be elucidated. Because of this, I have long felt that the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other fields of biology, notably development and the nervous system.

Most of the people who claim to be doing systems biology are really studying simple and complex molecular machines and how they function, and that is an aspect of systems biology; but it isn't. It's the networks that really capture and store and transmit and integrate and modulate and finally end up executing the biological information as it is.

Man's health and well-being depends upon, among many things, the proper functioning of the myriad proteins that participate in the intricate synergisms of living systems.

The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment.

There are very few things in the body that nitric oxide doesn't regulate.

Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundreds of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your brain by a single photon of light, the combined output would be blinding.

What does that suggest when a compound this simple plays such an important role? To me it suggests that nitric oxide is one of the most primitive elements of cellular signaling, that it goes way back into evolution.

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.

Cancer cells have a lot of other things that are really wrong with them, and we should never forget that these are cells that have become deaf to all the signals that the body sends out, such as you can multiply a certain amount, you can be in a certain place in the body, where to stay, where to move, and so on.

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.

It's nice to be able to look at one protein, but life is driven by the interactions between proteins, so it's really essential to be able to see multiple proteins at a time to understand these interactions.

A great deal has been learned about cell communication. The universal nature of cellular structure and organization in bacteria, plant and animal cells has been discovered.

Although we often discussed the idea of research on the nature of antigen recognition by T cells in the laboratory in the late Seventies while I was still in Basel, the real work did not start until the early Eighties in my new laboratory at M.I.T.

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