Richard J. Roberts Quotes

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.

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.

In this atmosphere I soon became interested in nucleic acids.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

DNA is ROM. It can be read millions of times over, but only written to once - when it is first assembled the birth of the cell in which it resides.

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.

All life is nucleic acid; the rest is commentary.

We have come a long way on that old molecule 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.

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

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

At the end of the 1970s, I was a young researcher at the Weizmann Institute with an ambitious plan to shed light on one of the major outstanding questions concerning living cells: the process of protein biosynthesis.

Every cell in your body contains the same genetic information.

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

The ribosome is a machine that gets instructions from the genetic code and operates chemically in order to produce the product.

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

I began studying ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow in Peter Moore's laboratory in 1978.