Martin Chalfie Quotes

A key issue in developmental biology at that time was the problem of how cells underwent differentiation, with most workers concentrating on explanations in terms of changes in enzyme and gene regulation.

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 am interested in how cells know what they are and how they should behave in their proper place in the body.

We know that our cells are speaking to each other.

As with most animal eggs, the early events of amphibian development are largely independent of the environment, and the processes leading to cell differentiation must involve a redistribution and interaction of constituents already present in the fertilized egg.

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

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.

The knowledge we have of communication among cells does not permit my giving you a sophisticated understanding.

It is now widely realized that nearly all the 'classical' problems of molecular biology have either been solved or will be solved in the next decade. The entry of large numbers of American and other biochemists into the field will ensure that all the chemical details of replication and transcription will be elucidated. Because of this, I have long felt that the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other fields of biology, notably development and the nervous system.

Nuclear transplantation is a technique that has enormously facilitated the analysis of these interactions between nucleus and cytoplasm.

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

One of the first papers I wrote at the University of Wisconsin, in 1977, was on stem cells. I realized that if I changed the environment that these cells were in, I could turn the cells into bone, and if I changed the environment a bit more, they would form fat cells.

My prime interests are in evolution and development. I use the cellular slime molds as a tool to seek an understanding of those twin disciplines.

Within one year of starting work, I had found that the nucleus of an endoderm cell from an advanced tadpole was able to yield some normal development up to the nuclear transplant tadpole stage.

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.

Embryology reveals surprising similarities between early embryos of seemingly quite different animals. And it also shows that some structures that may look very different later on have fundamental similarities in the way they form.

I've wanted to write a book on embryology, that extraordinary journey where you start off as a single cell and end up with a human body, for a general audience for years.

Well, there are two kinds of stem cells: adult stem cells, which you can get from any part of a grown body, and embryonic stem cells. These are the inner- core of days-old embryos that can develop into any kind of cell.

A human body is a conversation going on, both within the cells and between the cells, and they're telling each other to grow and to die; when you're sick, something's gone wrong with that conversation.

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.

A stem cell is essentially a blank cell capable of becoming another, more differentiated cell-type in the body, such as a skin cell, a muscle cell or a nerve cell.

For a decade, I had been studying a transparent worm, the C. elegans. I immediately thought, if you could put the G.F.P. gene into C. elegans, you'd then be able to see biological processes in live animals. Until then, we had to kill them and prepare their tissues chemically to visualize proteins or active genes within cells.

Within six months of starting my Ph.D. work in 1956, I had already obtained feeding tadpoles derived from transplanted nuclei of embryonic cells.

Therefore, I reasoned that study of the cell cycle responsible for the reproduction of cells was important and might even be illuminating about the nature of life.

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