Paul Nurse Quotes

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

My introduction to cell cycle control was provided by a clear, scholarly and beautiful seminar given by John Gerhart one afternoon in the summer of 1979.

I think you can say that life is a system in which proteins and nucleic acids interact in ways that allow the structure to grow and reproduce. It's that growth and reproduction, the ability to make more of yourself, that's important.

Cell culture is a little like gardening. You sit and you look at cells, and then you see something and say, 'You know, that doesn't look right'.

My main efforts focussed on trying to identify the rate controlling steps during the cell cycle. Crucial for this analysis were wee mutants that were advanced prematurely through the cell cycle and so divided at a reduced cell size.

Life needs a membrane to contain itself so it can replicate and mutate.

A great deal has been learned about cell communication. The universal nature of cellular structure and organization in bacteria, plant and animal cells has been discovered.

Except for certain moments - when cells are dividing, for instance - chromosomes don't form compact, countable bodies inside cells. Instead, they unravel and flop about, which makes counting chromosomes a bit like counting strands of ramen in a bowl.

The dream of every cell is to become two cells.

What is it that keeps you so interested in the telomere? It's so intricate and complicated, and you want to know how it works.

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

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

By the time I was 12 or 13, I was studying biochemistry textbooks.

Trying to understand fundamental processes that take place as organisms develop and how their various cells interact with one another - one can see what happens with those cells by asking questions about the fundamentals of biology.

For scientists, growing cells took so much work that they couldn't get much research done. So the selling of cells was really just for the sake of science, and there weren't a lot of profits.

When I went to the University, the medical school was the only place where one could hope to find the means to study life, its nature, its origins, and its ills.

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

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.

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.

I like writing about biology, not doing it.

This particular nurse said, Cancer cells are those which have forgotten how to die. I was so struck by this statement.

In this atmosphere I soon became interested in nucleic acids.

Pluripotent cells have the ability to grow into any cell in the body.

The importance of the egg's non-nuclear material - the cytoplasm - in early development is apparent in the consistent relation that is seen to exist between certain regions in the cytoplasm of a fertilized egg and certain kinds or directions of cell differentiation.