Alfred Hershey Quotes

As mechanistic biologists, we are hoping that by understanding how the virus works at the molecular level, we will be able to predict with more accuracy how it will evolve.

Similarly, another famous little quantum fluctuation that programs you is the exact configuration of your DNA.

Attempts have been made from a study of the changes produced by mutation to obtain the relative order of the bases within various triplets, but my own view is that these are premature until there is more extensive and more reliable data on the composition of the triplets.

Virus particles contain single molecules of nucleic acid.

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

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.

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.

The variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined.

At the deepest level, all living things that have ever been looked at have the same DNA code. And many of the same genes.

My lab used to do gene expression and genomics, and we did a lot of sequencing samples from virus outbreaks.

It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.

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

Haemoglobin is a very large molecule by ordinary standards, containing about ten thousand atoms, but the chances are that your haemoglobin and mine are identical, and significantly different from that of a pig or horse. You may be impressed by how much human beings differ from one another, but if you were to look into the fine details of the molecules of which they are constructed, you would be astonished by their similarity.

All life is nucleic acid; the rest is commentary.

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

We have come a long way on that old molecule DNA.

The greatest single achievement of nature to date was surely the invention of the molecule DNA.

Biology is a science of three dimensions. The first is the study of each species across all levels of biological organization, molecule to cell to organism to population to ecosystem. The second dimension is the diversity of all species in the biosphere. The third dimension is the history of each species in turn, comprising both its genetic evolution and the environmental change that drove the evolution. Biology, by growing in all three dimensions, is progressing toward unification and will continue to do so.

Three billion bases of DNA sequence can be put on a single compact disc and one will be able to pull a CD out of one's pocket and say, 'Here is a human being; it's me!'

Simple DNA gradually morphed and evolved, so that you had the coming into being of ever more complex and diverse creatures, until one day you wake up and find there are peacocks and giraffes. Nature is an open-ended experiment based on morphing a DNA code, and ours is an open-ended experiment based on morphing a crochet code.

There's more variation among human groups than between human groups.

A DNA sequence for the genome of bacteriophage ΦX174 of approximately 5,375 nucleotides has been determined using the rapid and simple 'plus and minus' method. The sequence identifies many of the features responsible for the production of the proteins of the nine known genes of the organism, including initiation and termination sites for the proteins and RNAs. Two pairs of genes are coded by the same region of DNA using different reading frames.

The reduced variability of small populations is not always due to accidental gene loss, but sometimes to the fact that the entire population was started by a single pair or by a single fertilized female. These 'founders' of the population carried with them only a very small proportion of the variability of the parent population. This 'founder' principle sometimes explains even the uniformity of rather large populations, particularly if they are well isolated and near the borders of the range of the species.

Quantitative work shows clearly that natural selection is a reality, and that, among other things, it selects Mendelian genes, which are known to be distributed at random through wild populations, and to follow the laws of chance in their distribution to offspring. In other words, they are an agency producing variation of the kind which Darwin postulated as the raw material on which selection acts.