Richard J. Roberts 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).

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.

In this atmosphere I soon became interested in nucleic acids.

The nucleic acids have considerable biological importance because of their role in cell growth and in the transmission of hereditary characters.

Much of modern molecular biology and microbiology has been based on the effort to decipher the basic code of life, which is made up of four nucleotides: adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine.

By then, I was making the slow transition from classical biochemistry to molecular biology and becoming increasingly preoccupied with how genes act and how proteins are made.

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.

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

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

Our understanding of how DNA informs our health and development is advancing at an incredible pace.

Biology - DNA - is technology. It is coding. It is physical coding, but still code.

I have this idea of trying to catalog all the genes on the planet.

Nuclear DNA encodes all the proteins and enzymes that make you you, basically.

So that's when I saw the DNA model for the first time, in the Cavendish, and that's when I saw that this was it. And in a flash you just knew that this was very fundamental.

You can't have life without the genetic code.

DNA, like a tape recording, carries a message in which there are specific instructions for a job to be done.

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.

Genes are like the story, and DNA is the language that the story is written in.

After I arrived in Basel, I initially attempted to continue the project of my days in Dulbecco's laboratory, namely, the transcriptional control of the simian virus 40 genes.

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.

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

I wanted to be a genetic engineer. That was my goal in college. I wanted to figure out what the codon sequence was that causes replication in a cardio myopathic virus. That was my goal.

The Human Genome Project has given us a genetic parts list.

Genes are natural resources.