Thomas Hunt Morgan Quotes

The egg of every species of animal or plant carries a definite number of bodies called chromosomes. The sperm carries the same number. Consequently, when the sperm unites with the egg, the fertilized egg will contain the double number of chromosomes.

Every cell in your body contains the same genetic information.

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

Life is the division of human cells, a process which begins at conception.

Heredity is nothing but stored environment.

If we think of our chromosomes - they carry our genetic material - as being like shoelaces, I work on the plastic tips at the end that protect them.

When sperm and egg unite, something goes from inanimate to animate. It is life.

Man comes not from an egg but from an animalcule that is found in male sperm.

Genes themselves are made of bits.

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

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

Upon the union of the male germ cell with the female egg cell, a new cell is created which almost immediately splits into two parts. One of these grows rapidly, creating the human body of the individual with all its organs, and dies only with the individual.

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

I didn't know how babies were made until I was pregnant with my fourth child.

Now, an embryo may seem like some scientific or laboratory term, but, in fact, the embryo contains the unique information that defines a person.

In the seventeenth century, it was held by some that inside a human sperm there was a minute human being - a homunculus - that was planted inside the womb. Development consisted of the miniature homunculus enlarging and passing through birth and on to maturity-just like inflating a balloon.

Now an embryo may seem like some scientific or laboratory term, but in fact the embryo contains the unique information that defines a person. All you add is food and climate control, and some time, and the embryo becomes you or me.

DNA is a 'thing' - a chemical that sticks to your fingers.

Some of the exponents of this theory of heredity have attempted to elude the difficulty of placing a whole world of wonders within a body so small and so devoid of physical structure as the germ.

For my part, I would say that the male sperm and seeds of plants have been penetrated so far that there is nothing further to discover in this great secret, but I could err in my opinion.

We know that at conception, the genetic code is there for a unique individual. This is not something that is just a religious belief.

It would be pleasant to believe that some of Lincoln's DNA is actively swimming around in somebody's soup, but all the evidence is against it. And of course, there's always the risk that what we might get would be more Robert Todd Lincoln than Abraham Lincoln.

The body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene

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

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