Cellular Processes Quotes

The fallacy of genetic determinism is to suppose that the genes "make' the organism. It is a basic principle of developmental biology that organisms undergo a continuous development from conception to death, a development that is the unique consequence of the interaction of the genes in their cells, the temporal sequence of environments through which the organisms pass, and random cellular processes that determine the life, death, and transformation of cells. As a result, even the fingerprints of identical twins are not identical. Their temperaments, mental processes, abilities, life choices, disease histories, and death certainly differ despite the determined efforts of many parents to enforce as great a similarity as possible.

There is more to biology than rats, Drosophila, Caenorhabditis, and E. coli.

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

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.

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.

No knowledge can be more satisfactory to a man than that of his own frame, its parts, their functions and actions.

A cell is regarded as the true biological atom.

Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on the earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world.

The language of God is not English or Latin; the language of God is cellular and molecular.

Our cells engage in protein production, and many of those proteins are enzymes responsible for the chemistry of life.

As can be seen even by this limited number of examples proteins carry out amazingly diverse functions.

My fascination is broadly with biology and the fact that our increased understanding of biology allows for breakthroughs in a broad set of diseases.

A living cell requires energy not only for all its functions, but also for the maintenance of its structure.

Life is just chemicals. A drop here, a drip there, everything's changed. A mere dribble of fermented juices and sudenlly you're going to live another few hours.

Because of the relationship between programmed cell death and human disease, the identification of the genes and proteins that function in the process of programmed cell death has provided new targets for possible intervention in a broad diversity of disorders.

We are seeing the cells of plants and animals more and more clearly as chemical factories, where the various products are manufactured in separate workshops.

Biochemistry is the science of life. All our life processes - walking, talking, moving, feeding - are essentially chemical reactions. So biochemistry is actually the chemistry of life, and it's supremely interesting.

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

One of the major lessons in all of biochemistry, cell biology and molecular medicine is that when proteins operate at the sub cellular level, they behave in a certain way as if they're mechanical machinery.

Most of the people who claim to be doing systems biology are really studying simple and complex molecular machines and how they function, and that is an aspect of systems biology; but it isn't. It's the networks that really capture and store and transmit and integrate and modulate and finally end up executing the biological information as it is.

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

Medicine is no longer looking at organs. It looks at the processes inside the cell.

I find it quite fascinating to see how the body works.

Adult stem cells tend not to form tumors.

If you go back to the first single-cell form of life, it clearly possessed the capacity to receive, to utilize, to store, to transform, and to transmit information.