Richard Dawkins Quotes

Nucleic acids are the main information-carrying molecules of the cell, and, by directing the process of protein synthesis, they determine the inherited characteristics of every living thing. The two main classes of nucleic acids are deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA).

You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I'm talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells.

Genetics is about how information is stored and transmitted between generations.

The human genome contains so much data that, it has been calculated, it would fill 43 volumes of Webster's International Dictionary.

Genes are biochemical recipes written in a four-letter alphabet called DNA.

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

It seems likely that most if not all the genetic information in any organism is carried by nucleic acid - usually by DNA, although certain small viruses use RNA as their genetic material.

Every cell in your body contains the same genetic information.

DNA is the master blueprint for life and constitutes the genetic material in all free-living organisms and most viruses. RNA is the genetic material of certain viruses, but it is also found in all living cells, where it plays an important role in certain processes such as the making of proteins.

During the decade following the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA, the problem of translation - namely, how genetic information is used to synthesize proteins - was a central topic in molecular biology.

You'd need a very specialized electron microscope to get down to the level to actually see a single strand of DNA.

Most organisms have loads of junk DNA - less pejoratively, noncoding DNA - cluttering their cells.

There is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over.

The river of my title is a river of DNA, a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues

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

All life is nucleic acid; the rest is commentary.

What are the chances that we will one day discover that DNA has absolutely nothing to do with inheritance? They are effectively zero.

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

I'm fascinated by the idea that genetics is digital. A gene is a long sequence of coded letters, like computer information. Modern biology is becoming very much a branch of information technology.

Genes themselves are made of bits.

The moment I saw the model and heard about the complementing base pairs I realized that it was the key to understanding all the problems in biology we had found intractable - it was the birth of molecular biology.

Telomeres are the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes in cells. Chromosomes carry the genetic information. Telomeres are buffers. They are like the tips of shoelaces. If you lose the tips, the ends start fraying.

The body itself is an information processor. Memory resides not just in brains but in every cell. No wonder genetics bloomed along with information theory. DNA is the quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at the cellular level - an alphabet and a code, 6 billion bits to form a human being.

I knew the ribosome was going to be the focus of Nobel prizes. It stands at the crossroads of biology, between the gene and what comes out of the gene. But I had convinced myself I was not going to be a winner.

The origin of each of us stems from codes of genetic inheritance.