Nucleic Acid Quotes

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

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.

According to physical measurements, DNA chains are, on the average, 10,000 units long.

Different viral species contain nucleic acids that differ not only in length and nucleotide sequence but in many unexpected ways as well.

I feel now, as we did then, that for an effective approach to the problem of nucleic acid biosynthesis, it was essential to understand the biosynthesis of the simple nucleotides and the coenzymes and to have these concepts and methodology well in hand.

Virus particles contain single molecules of nucleic acid.

All life is nucleic acid; the rest is commentary.

How is the base sequence, divided into codons? There is nothing in the backbone of the nucleic acid, which is perfectly regular, to show us how to group the bases into codons.

The strands of the DNA double helix are held together by hydrogen bonding interactions between the complementary base pairs. Heating DNA in solution easily breaks these hydrogen bonds, allowing the two strands to separate - a process called denaturation or melting.

Natural DNA is a tractless coil, like an unwound and tangled audiotape on the floor of the car in the dark.

In my first publishable research, I obtained evidence that the replication of polio viral RNA engendered a multi-stranded intermediate, although my description of that intermediate proved flawed in its details.

DNA is an abbreviation for deoxyribonucleicantidisestablishmentarianism, a complex string of syllables.

It seems likely that most if not all the genetic information in any organism is carried by nucleic acid - usually by DNA, although certain small viruses use RNA as their genetic material.

Years ago R.N.A. was kind of a bit player in the cell. Now our picture's completely inverted, and we think R.N.A.'s really the important thing.

DNA is a 'thing' - a chemical that sticks to your fingers.

Analysis of the composition of samples of DNA from a great variety of sources and by many investigators revealed the remarkable fact that the purine content always equals the pyrimidine content.

It now seems certain that the amino acid sequence of any protein is determined by the sequence of bases in some region of a particular nucleic acid molecule.

DNA was my only gold rush. I regarded DNA as worth a gold rush.

One can say, looking at the papers in this symposium, that the elucidation of the genetic code is indeed a great achievement. It is, in a sense, the key to molecular biology because it shows how the great polymer languages, the nucleic acid language and the protein language, are linked together.