Ada Yonath Quotes

Moreover the incorporation requires the same components needed for protein synthesis, and is inhibited by the same inhibitors. Thus the system is most unlikely to be a complete artefact and is very probably closely related to genuine protein synthesis.

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.

My interest in protein breakdown as a research problem began in l955 at about the time I joined the Biochemistry Department of Yale University. It was known that proteins break down intracellularly in the mature animal.

The development of methods to monitor protein dynamics in cells together with the discovery of specific and general lysosomal inhibitors have resulted in the identification of different classes of cellular proteins, long- and short-lived, and the findings of the differential effects of the inhibitors on these groups.

I wanted to reveal how genetic code is translated into protein. I knew a great application could be for antibiotics, since half of the useful ones target the ribosomes, but I didn't believe I could contribute to it. It was like the next Mount Everest to conquer. It was my dream to contribute something to humanity.

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

We discovered a mechanism which is like the garbage machine of the body. We need to remove damaged proteins and create new ones in their place, and we discovered the machine that does this.

Many ribosomes act simultaneously along the mRNA, forming superstructures called polysomes.

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.

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

Protein synthesis is a central problem for the whole of biology, and that it is in all probability closely related to gene action.

Coition is a slight attack of apoplexy. For man gushes forth from man, and is separated by being torn apart with a kind of blow.

In the ocean, [bioluminescence] is the rule rather than the exception.

Nature has put itself the problem how to catch in flight light streaming to the earth and to store the most elusive of all powers in rigid form. To achieve this aim, it has covered the crust of earth with organisms which in their life processes absorb the light of the sun and use this power to produce a continuously accumulating chemical difference. ... The plants take in one form of power, light; and produce another power, chemical difference.

Your digestive system is your body's Fun House, whereby food goes on a long, dark, scary ride, taking all kinds of unexpected twists and turns, being attacked by vicious secretions along the way, and not knowing until the last minute whether it will be turned into a useful body part or ejected into the Dark Hole by Mister Sphincter.

In the past few decades, there has been a revolution in how we perceive the body. What appears to be an object, a three-dimensional anatomical structure, is actually a process, a constant flow of energy and information.

We are, if anything - I do believe we function as a sort of editorial cartoon. That we are a digestive process, like so many other digestive processes that go on.

Even if all the world were to combine forces, they could not bring about the conception of a single child in any woman's womb nor cause it to be born; that is wholly the work of God.

Evolution ... is opportunistic, hence unpredictable.

To know the brain...is equivalent to ascertaining the material course of thought and will, to discovering the intimate history of life in its perpetual duel with external forces.

You've got to get away from the idea cancer is a disease to be cured. It's not a disease really. The cancer cell is your own body, your own cells, just misbehaving and going a bit wrong, and you don't have to cure cancer. You don't have to get rid of all those cells. Most people have cancer cells swirling around inside them all the time and mostly they don't do any harm, so what we want to do is prevent the cancer from gaining control. We just want to keep it in check for long enough that people die of something else.

I think of evolution as an error-making and error-correcting process, and we are constantly learning from experience.

It is memory that provides the heart with impetus, fuels the brain, and propels the corn plant from seed to fruit.

Life ... is a relationship between molecules.