Richard Dawkins Quotes

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.

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

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.

For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.

I'm constantly maxing out my Gmail account, and that is hard to do.

Telomeres are the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes in cells. Chromosomes carry the genetic information. Telomeres are buffers. They are like the tips of shoelaces. If you lose the tips, the ends start fraying.

Last time I checked, the digital universe was expanding at the rate of five trillion bits per second in storage and two trillion transistors per second on the processing side.

People simply don't have room, physical room, to keep, for instance, 2-inch tape in the sort of quantities that are required to hold a full archive. It's not just a matter of having three or four boxes, it's 40, 90 boxes of 2-inch tape, and very few people have the resources that sort of stuff properly.

The amount of information that can be stored by the ultimate laptop, 10 to the 31st bits, is much higher than the 10 to the 10th bits stored on current laptops.

Every cell in your body contains the same genetic information.

Nucleic acids are the main information-carrying molecules of the cell, and, by directing the process of protein synthesis, they determine the inherited characteristics of every living thing. The two main classes of nucleic acids are deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA).

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.

Most organisms have loads of junk DNA - less pejoratively, noncoding DNA - cluttering their cells.

The great thing about a computer notebook is that no matter how much you stuff into it, it doesn't get bigger or heavier.

If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.

I've often asked myself, how much information can the brain actually hold? There'll probably come a day when you're able to download it; that's what you have to do when the machine's full.

That we plug in carts or CDs with megabytes of memory when only yesterday we were happy to have 64K or 128K in our Apple II and PC workhorses... that's nothing short of phenomenal.

As was predicted at the beginning of the Human Genome Project, getting the sequence will be the easy part as only technical issues are involved. The hard part will be finding out what it means, because this poses intellectual problems of how to understand the participation of the genes in the functions of living cells.

A cell is a complex structure, with its investing membrane, nucleus, and nucleolus.

Until 1930 or thereabout biologists [using microscopes], in the situation of Astronomers and Astrophysicists, were permitted to see the objects of their interest, but not to touch them; the cell was as distant from us, as the stars and galaxies were from them.

There's such a magnitude of record taking. It's so exhaustive. Bandwidth and hard drive space are able to accommodate limitless capacities to take a record of anything and everything.

Years ago R.N.A. was kind of a bit player in the cell. Now our picture's completely inverted, and we think R.N.A.'s really the important thing.

Too few people in computer science are aware of some of the informational challenges in biology and their implications for the world. We can store an incredible amount of data very cheaply.

A cell is regarded as the true biological atom.

Every cell has certain knowledge. I think knowledge is contained within the genetics, even. I think scientists will find that. I don't think there's a gay gene, though. They may argue that down, but I don't think that, because that's a preference.