Cell Biology Quotes

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.

I've always been interested in science - one of my favourite books is James Watson's 'Molecular Biology of the Gene.'

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

In my second year, after moving to the Medical School, I began the courses of Anatomy and Physiology. I had begun to see that I was interested in cells and their functions.

I started taking a basic biology course, and I really loved it. I started asking research questions incessantly. I was drawn very quickly to biology.

I remember being in strong physics, physiology and biology classes.

Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century.

We have 100 genes or so, which we know we can't knock out without killing the cell, that are of unknown structure.

Until 1985, when my lab found the protein they are made of, aquaporins hadn't yet been identified. There had been a controversy in biology for more than 100 years about how water moved through cells.

The major thing is to view biology as an information science.

The dream of every cell is to become two cells.

Stem cell research has the greatest promise of any scientific development.

I became aware of the very complex internal organization in a cell from the basic science classes, and it made me think about how all that could work. It seemed like a great mystery, especially how organelles in the cell can be arranged in three dimensions, and how thousands of proteins could find their way to the right location in the cells.

But while doing that I'd been following a variety of fields in science and technology, including the work in molecular biology, genetic engineering, and so forth.

I have a biology degree, okay?

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.

Henrietta Lacks' cells are immortal. They are known as the HeLa cell line, and they have become deeply involved in all sorts of medical and genetic research - sometimes in the most unexpected ways.

The idea was to study fertilization in as many different phyla and organisms as possible, using the simplest possible equipment and a microscope. Biochemical approaches were not much in vogue, and running gels impossible at first.

In the early 1950s, during the near avalanche of discoveries, rediscoveries, and redefinitions of subcellular components made possible by electron microscopy, those prospecting in this newly opened field were faced with the problem of what to do with their newly acquired wealth.

A paradigm shift is the best a scientist can hope for. Whenever I smell an opportunity like that, I go after it. You have a new discovery that something's working in a different way than you thought. And this is particularly true in molecular and cell biology, which is structural biology and has the least potential for controversy and partisanship among the biological scientists. You're dealing with a concrete object that's either there or not there.

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.

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.

Every cell is a triumph of natural selection, and we’re made of trillions of cells. Within us, is a little universe.

In 1973, I left the Rockefeller University to join the Yale University Medical School. The main reason for the move was my belief that the time had come for fruitful interactions between the new discipline of Cell Biology and the traditional fields of interest of medical schools, namely Pathology and Clinical Medicine.