Simple Organisms Quotes

[Jellyfish] are 97% water or something, so how much are they doing? Just give them another 3% and make them water. It's more useful.

Jellyfish serve as a model for bioengineers for the same reason yeast were once so valuable to geneticists: they're simple to deconstruct.

Not all living creatures die. An amoeba, for example, need never die; it need not even, like certain generals, fade away. It just divides and becomes two new amoebas.

If we understand the worm, we understand life.

Algae are such basic, simple organisms.

Time and time again, truly basic studies of simple experimental organisms have proved directly relevant to human biology and human disease. An investment in such basic studies is an effective investment indeed.

The existence of common features in different forms of life indicates some relationship between the different organisms, and according to the concept of evolution, these relations stem from the circumstance that the higher organisms, in the course of millions of years, have gradually evolved from simpler ones.

Electronic calculators can solve problems which the man who made them cannot solve; but no government-subsidized commission of engineers and physicists could create a worm.

We have spoken of beings so low in the scale that the individuals throughout their whole existence are not sufficiently specialized to be distinctively plant or animal: yet these are definite life in simpler shape.

A jellyfish is little more than a pulsating bell, a tassel of trailing tentacles and a single digestive opening through which it both eats and excretes - as regrettable an example of economy of design as ever was.

We have 26,000 genes. But a blind, millimetre-long roundworm with only 959 cells in total already has over 19,000.

Well, we can study aging in people, but of course those studies take decades. So what we try to do is we use simpler organisms to try and understand the basic mechanisms and so in my laboratory, for example, we use things like simple baker's yeast that we use to make bread.