Biomolecules Quotes

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

Many years ago it was taught that plants and animals were composed of different materials: plants, of a chemical substance of three elements,- carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen; animals of one of four elements, nitrogen being added to the other three.

I'm so biased to this issue of the origins of life and the limits of life.

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.

Most research into life's murky origin has been carried out by chemists. They've tried a variety of approaches in their attempts to recreate the first steps on the road to life, but little progress has been made. Perhaps that is no surprise, given life's stupendous complexity.

Biology is the most powerful technology ever created. DNA is software, protein are hardware, cells are factories.

Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?

Chemical compounds of carbon can exist in an infinite variety of compositions, forms and sizes. The naturally occurring organic substances are the basis of all life on Earth, and their science at the molecular level defines a fundamental language of that life.

Nature works with five polymers. Only five polymers. In the natural world, life builds from the bottom up, and it builds in resilience and multiple uses.

So how can we test the idea that the transition from nonlife to life is simple enough to happen repeatedly? The most obvious and straightforward way is to search for a second form of life on Earth. No planet is more Earth-like than Earth itself, so if the path to life is easy, then life should have started up many times over right here.

Disease and ill health are caused largely by damage at the molecular and cellular level, yet today's surgical tools are too large to deal with that kind of problem.

The building blocks of life are readily available throughout the universe.

The question we ask is - if there is life on other planets, should we expect it to be based on the same molecules, i.e. be universal - or should we expect it to depend on the local conditions, i.e. on the planet's geochemistry. So to find out, we try experiments on biomolecules, starting with such geochemistry conditions.

It is impossible to encircle the hips of a girl with my right arm and hold her smile in my left hand, then proceed to study the two items separately. Similarly, we can not separate life from living matter, in order to study only living matter and its reactions. Inevitably, studying living matter and its reactions, we study life itself

Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties.

We're not just any star stuff, most of which is humdrum hydrogen and listless helium. Our bodies include fancier ingredients like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, and a few other herbs and spices.

As soon as we can wrest from Nature the secret of the internal structure of the compounds produced by her, chemical science can then even surpass Nature by producing compounds as variations of the natural ones, which the living cell is unable to construct.

The first serious applications were in triterpenoid chemistry.

No planet is more earth-like than Earth itself, so if life really does pop up readily in earth-like conditions, then surely it should have arisen many times right here on our home planet? And how do we know it didn't? The truth is, nobody has looked.

Anything that's living is a machine. I'm a machine; my children are machines. I can step back and see them as being a bag of skin full of biomolecules that are interacting according to some laws.

Few scientists acquainted with the chemistry of biological systems at the molecular level can avoid being inspired.

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

Biochemical interactions are very interesting to me.