John Cornforth Quotes

People don't realize that molecules themselves are somewhat hypothetical, and that their interactions are more so, and that the biological reactions are even more so.

Faced with this general consideration it will immediately be realized on inquiry into the particular position occupied within this general scheme by the scientific field of catalysis that it is in the first stages of its development.

Biochemical interactions are very interesting to me.

Ultimately, biological phenomena involve molecules, and understanding them involves understanding the underlying chemistry. In my opinion, this is a particularly exciting area of chemistry.

My own ideas on the mechanism of catalytic phenomena were very different from those at one time commonly held, ideas which I no doubt owed to the influence of the illustrious teacher who had guided my first steps in chemistry nearly twenty years before - I refer, of course, to Berthelot.

Our femtosecond snapshots can examine a molecule at discrete instants in time.

I tell my students to try to know molecules, so well that when they have some question involving molecules, they can ask themselves, What would I do if I were that molecule?

Chemistry is a hard thing. I don't think you can force it, and it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have great chemistry outside of work. It's just something that sparks on screen or doesn't.

There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.

Chemistry, until my childhood, not that long ago, was regarded as a calculating device. Because you couldn't reduce to physics. So it's just some way of calculating the result of experiments. The Bohr atom was treated that way.

It turns out all molecular and biological systems have speeds of the atoms move inside them; the fastest possible speeds are determined by their molecular vibrations, and this speed is about a kilometre per second.

I was also interested in formulating the path of chemical reactions.

The detailed geometry of the coenzyme molecule as a whole is fascinating in its complexity.

Physiology is the science which treats of the properties of organic bodies, animal and vegetable, of the phenomena they present, and of the laws which govern their actions. Inorganic substances are the objects of other sciences, - physics and chemistry.

In order to figure out how to make atoms compute, you have to learn how to speak their language and to understand how they process information under normal circumstances.

But the prospects of designing chemical plants for industrial scale chemical processes seemed far less interesting than the chemical events that occur in biological systems.

The most common and most important result of them is that the nature and size of the effect on corresponding series of different elements are largely an expression of the peculiarity of their atomic structure - or, at least, of the structure of the surface.

The chemist, whose science is immediately concerned with the combinations of atoms, has rarely found it necessary to discuss their shapes, and gives them no particular forms in his diagrams. That does not mean that the shapes are unimportant, but rather that the older methods could not define them.

Much of my work in biology has been driven by my early training in chemistry. When studying a new chemical compound, the first and most important thing is to determine its detailed molecular structure.

We can track and see the production of single molecules, trace them and see how they assemble into structures.

Molecular chemistry, the chemistry of the covalent bond, is concerned with uncovering and mastering the rules that govern the structures, properties and transformations of molecular species.

The more the relationships of the nitrogen-rich substances to the cell nucleus were recognized, the more the question of the arrangement of the nitrogen and carbon atoms in the molecule came to stand out.

Molecules A and B meet, marry, and beget the species. This takes place in one-millionth of a billionth of a second. This is a fundamental process in nature, and the world was looking for a way to be able to see the process. But many brilliant people said it couldn't be done.

Molecular collision dynamics has been a wonderful area of research for all practitioners. This is especially true for those who were following the footsteps of pioneers and leaders of the field twenty years ago.

I have lived much of my life among molecules. They are good company.