Joshua Lederberg Quotes

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

The subject I was best at in school was biology.

When I went to the University, the medical school was the only place where one could hope to find the means to study life, its nature, its origins, and its ills.

Studying organisms at a molecular level was totally compelling because it was moving from being a naturalist, which was the 19th-century kind of science, to being very focused and really getting to the heart of these molecules.

But while doing that I'd been following a variety of fields in science and technology, including the work in molecular biology, genetic engineering, and so forth.

In this atmosphere I soon became interested in nucleic acids.

I would be the worst biologist in the world!

One of my degrees was a science degree in biology.

My degree is in biology, and it will always be my first love. Evolution, ecology, genetics - they were the textbooks I was devouring as a teenager, and it was there that my love of science grew.

I have a biology degree, okay?

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

Biochemical interactions are very interesting to me.

I like biology a lot.

This substance, which is manifold in its forms and protean in its transformations, has, in its state of living matter, one physiological name which has become familiar, that of protoplasm.

I realized that lab research was the perfect path for me. It allowed me to spend every day figuring out mysteries/puzzles that have to do with what make us alive. What could be a bigger mystery or puzzle?

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.

Mainly I study the sense of touch and what the molecules are that transduce touch. And I use mutants in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to look at that problem.

I'm actually pretty scientifically interested. I have a lot of friends who are doctors, so the idea of the virus and the synapses in the brain and how the nervous system works was actually all pretty familiar to me.

I like writing about biology, not doing it.

I was originally going to become a biochemist, but it just got way too complicated.

Fred Sanger was one of the most important scientists of the 20th century.

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.

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.

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

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