Antonie van Leeuwenhoek 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.

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

The process of the body changing and making a whole human fascinates me.

I didn't know then what a sperm was, and so wouldn't understand his answer for several years. "My boy," he said, "you are descended from a long line of determined, resourceful, microscopic tadpoles-- champions every one.

The minute those two little particles inside a woman's womb have joined together, billions of decisions have been made. A thing like that has to come from entropy.

I loved the idea that biology was logical.

In basic research, the use of the electron microscope has revealed to us the complex universe of the cell, the basic unit of life.

You can't have life without the genetic code.

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

Heredity is to-day the central problem of biology. This problem may be approached from many sides—that of the breeder, the experimenter, the statistician, the physiologist, the embryologist, the cytologist—but the mechanism of heredity can be studied best by the investigation of the germ cells and their development.

Amoebas at the start Were not complex; They tore themselves apart And started Sex.

If we understand the worm, we understand life.

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

Every seed is awakened, and all animal life.

Heredity is nothing but stored environment.

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

Understanding how DNA transmits all it knows about cancer, physics, dreaming and love will keep man searching for some time.

If you go back to the first single-cell form of life, it clearly possessed the capacity to receive, to utilize, to store, to transform, and to transmit information.

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.

Biology will relate every human gene to the genes of other animals and bacteria, to this great chain of being.

Evolution, cell biology, biochemistry, and developmental biology have made extraordinary progress in the last hundred years - much of it since I was weaned on schoolboy biology in the 1930s. Most striking of all is the sudden eruption of molecular biology starting in the 1950s.

In an age of molecular genomics, it is ever more apparent that the fingerprints of evolution are pressed deeply into human DNA, just as they are into the genomes of every other organism. Biologists understand this, and so do students who study the science of life.

A solid foundation in genetics is increasingly important for everyone.

I would only once have the opportunity to let my scientific career encompass a path from the double helix to the three billion steps of the human genome.

It is essential for genetic material to be able to make exact copies of itself; otherwise growth would produce disorder, life could not originate, and favourable forms would not be perpetuated by natural selection.