Michael Behe Quotes

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

In many biological structures proteins are simply components of larger molecular machines.

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.

Genes are effectively one-dimensional. If you write down the sequence of A, C, G and T, that's kind of what you need to know about that gene. But proteins are three-dimensional. They have to be because we are three-dimensional, and we're made of those proteins. Otherwise we'd all sort of be linear, unimaginably weird creatures.

Inside of a living cell there are thousands of proteins that enable it to make more of itself and make your malaria drug, for instance. We don't understand those. We don't understand how they work together.

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

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.

The basic structure of proteins is quite simple: they are formed by hooking together in a chain discrete subunits called amino acids.

That the primary effect of gene mutation may be as simple as the substitution of a single amino acid by another and may lead to profound secondary changes in protein structure and properties has recently been strongly indicated by the work of Ingram on hemoglobin.

Biochemical interactions are very interesting to me.

You see, proteins, as I probably needn't tell you, are immensely complicated groupings of amino acids and certain other specialized compounds, arranged in intricate three-dimensional patterns that are as unstable as sunbeams on a cloudy day. It is this instability that is life, since it is forever changing its position in an effort to maintain its identity--in the manner of a long rod balanced on an acrobat's nose.

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

Biochemistry is the science of life. All our life processes - walking, talking, moving, feeding - are essentially chemical reactions. So biochemistry is actually the chemistry of life, and it's supremely interesting.

One of the major lessons in all of biochemistry, cell biology and molecular medicine is that when proteins operate at the sub cellular level, they behave in a certain way as if they're mechanical machinery.

A big tree seemed even more beautiful to me when I imagined thousands of tiny photosynthesis machines inside every leaf. So I went to MIT and worked on bacteria because that's where people knew the most about these switches, how to control the genetics.

Living organisms are created by chemistry. We are huge packages of chemicals.

Serum albumin is a well-defined protein, but no laboratory has yet attempted to ascertain its full chemical structure.

The blood pigment haemoglobin is a compound which can be split by diverse methods into its constituents, pigment and protein.

DNA is a code of four letters; proteins are made up of amino acids which come in 20 forms. So the ribosome is a very clever machine that reads one language and operates in another.

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.

Few scientists acquainted with the chemistry of biological systems at the molecular level can avoid being inspired.

This led to the discovery that long chain fatty acids would remarkably stabilize serum albumin to heat denaturation, and would even reverse the denaturation by heat or concentrated urea solutions.

Owing to the difficulty of dealing with substances of high molecular weight we are still a long way from having determined the chemical characteristics and the constitution of proteins, which are regarded as the principal con-stituents of living organisms.

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

Once the principle is there, that cells have the same genes, my own personal belief is that we will, in the end, understand everything about how cells actually work.