John Gurdon Quotes

I was driven completely by a desire to understand how cells worked.

Every cell in your body contains the same genetic information.

I became aware of the very complex internal organization in a cell from the basic science classes, and it made me think about how all that could work. It seemed like a great mystery, especially how organelles in the cell can be arranged in three dimensions, and how thousands of proteins could find their way to the right location in the cells.

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.

As long as we do not know how the cell works, we don't know the kind of havoc the AIDS virus creates in the cell.

We know specific genes are turned on in specific cells, but we don't know to what extent this happens.

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.

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.

Heritability pertains to the entirety of the genome, not to a single gene.

Our cells engage in protein production, and many of those proteins are enzymes responsible for the chemistry of life.

The question is not whether but how do the actions of a given gene influence some interesting aspect of behavior.

Inside of a living cell there are thousands of proteins that enable it to make more of itself and make your malaria drug, for instance. We don't understand those. We don't understand how they work together.

Genes themselves are made of bits.

Some of the most significant advances in molecular biology have relied upon the methodology of genetics. The same statement may be made concerning our understanding of immunological phenomena.

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.

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

It would appear that the number of nonsense triplets is rather low, since we only occasionally come across them. However this conclusion is less secure than our other deductions about the general nature of the genetic code.

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.

Biology is far from understanding exactly how a single cell develops into a baby, but research suggests that human development can ultimately be explained in terms of biochemistry and molecular biology. Most scientists would make a similar statement about evolution.

Epigenetics doesn't change the genetic code, it changes how that's read. Perfectly normal genes can result in cancer or death. Vice-versa, in the right environment, mutant genes won't be expressed. Genes are equivalent to blueprints; epigenetics is the contractor. They change the assembly, the structure.

If you talk to geneticists they are constantly finding that your genes are being switched on and off because of the environment. Genes alone do not determine an exact path in your life.

The more we understand what happens in living cells, the more incredibly powerful you realize things can be when they work from the bottom up, by interaction of one molecule and another.

I became fascinated by the then-blossoming science of molecular biology when, in my senior year, I happened to read the papers by Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod on the operon theory.

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.