Molecular Biology Quotes

When I was at Stanford, I was actually in the cancer biology program, but I mostly focused on infectious disease.

I'm fascinated by the idea that genetics is digital. A gene is a long sequence of coded letters, like computer information. Modern biology is becoming very much a branch of information technology.

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

The neuroscience area - which is absolutely in its infancy - is much more important than genetics.

What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.

My prime interests are in evolution and development. I use the cellular slime molds as a tool to seek an understanding of those twin disciplines.

When I read about genetics, I see breakthroughs every day. And while I'm trying to learn more about behavioral science, I must say that I don't feel I get tremendous intellectual stimulation from most of the things I read.

I am terribly proud of-I was born in Cambridge in 1952 and my initials are DNA!

Our work on C. elegans emphasized the benefits of sharing large amounts of information. We took a global approach to discover the mechanisms that led to the development of the worm.

What I see in science is a lot of imagination referring to things that are fundamental to what we are. Our cells, our history, our future, our place in the universe, our lack of place in the universe. That's poetry as far as I'm concerned.

I've always been interested in science - one of my favourite books is James Watson's 'Molecular Biology of the Gene.'

In 1995, I founded The Molecular Sciences Institute with a gift from the Philip Morris Company where I hoped that we could create an environment where young people could pursue science in an atmosphere of harmonious purpose and high intellectual challenge.

When I was 16, my dad took me to a DNA conference at the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco, California, and I was captivated by this way of looking at biology and by the discussions of bits of nucleic acid that could make us sick.

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

It has yet to be shown by direct biochemical methods, as opposed to the indirect genetic evidence mentioned earlier, that the code is indeed a triplet code.

There is a close analogy between organic chemistry in its relation to biochemistry and pure mathematics in its relation to physics.

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.

The major credit I think Jim and I deserve ... is for selecting the right problem and sticking to it. It's true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold, but the fact remains that we were looking for gold. Both of us had decided, quite independently of each other, that the central problem in molecular biology was the chemical structure of the gene. ... We could not see what the answer was, but we considered it so important that we were determined to think about it long and hard, from any relevant point of view.

We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution.

The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy, but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences.

I started taking a basic biology course, and I really loved it. I started asking research questions incessantly. I was drawn very quickly to biology.

So that's when I saw the DNA model for the first time, in the Cavendish, and that's when I saw that this was it. And in a flash you just knew that this was very fundamental.

Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows.

It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology.

At the National Institute for Medical Research, I came into contact with biological scientists and formed collaborative projects with several of them. In particular, George Popjak and I shared an interest in cholesterol.