Alfred Hershey Quotes

I had become monomaniacal about DNA only in 1951 when I had just turned 23 and as a postdoctoral fellow was temporarily in Naples attending a small May meeting on biologically important macromolecules.

The moment I saw the model and heard about the complementing base pairs I realized that it was the key to understanding all the problems in biology we had found intractable - it was the birth of molecular biology.

Physical studies of DNA had, of course, been under way for some years before analysis of virus particles began.

You'd need a very specialized electron microscope to get down to the level to actually see a single strand of DNA.

In the 1970s, I did a Ph.D. with Fred Sanger in Cambridge who was in the process of inventing ways to map what's inside DNA. He later won the Nobel Prize.

So that's when I saw the DNA model for the first time, in the Cavendish, and that's when I saw that this was it. And in a flash you just knew that this was very fundamental.

In this atmosphere I soon became interested in nucleic acids.

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.

I started doing science when I was effectively 20, a graduate student of Salvador Luria at Indiana University. And that was - you know, it took me about two years, you know, being a graduate student with Luria deciding I wanted to find the structure of DNA; that is, DNA was going to be my objective.

It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.

I set up a laboratory in the Department of Physiology in the Medical School in South Africa and begin to try to find a bacteriophage system which we might use to solve the genetic code.

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.

Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas.

Fred Sanger was one of the most important scientists of the 20th century.

I didn't study science beyond high school level, but I'd been reading a lot of science books by people like Richard Dawkins, Matt Ridley and Daniel Dennett. I also spent a year working on a fellowship in a research centre - the Allan Wilson Centre - where I got a hands-on look at their work sequencing DNA.

Nature - how, we don't know - has technology that works in every living cell and that depends on every atom being precisely in the right spot. Enzymes are precise down to the last atom. They're molecules. You put the last atom in, and it's done. Nature does things with molecular perfection.

I began studying ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow in Peter Moore's laboratory in 1978.

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).

DNA was my only gold rush. I regarded DNA as worth a gold rush.

Biology - DNA - is technology. It is coding. It is physical coding, but still code.

DNA is an abbreviation for deoxyribonucleicantidisestablishmentarianism, a complex string of syllables.

I started working on ribosomes when I was a post doc, in 1978, when it would have been impossible, really, to solve it. But, it was just a fundamental problem in biology.

I was a close observer of the developments in molecular biology.

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