Life cannot have had a random beginning. ... The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in 10 to the 40,000 power, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.
The excitement of vitamins, nutrition and metabolism permeated the environment.
Catalysts are the conductors who choreograph the chemical dance that results in the formation of new structures.
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.
You could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination.
This substance, which is manifold in its forms and protean in its transformations, has, in its state of living matter, one physiological name which has become familiar, that of protoplasm.
Microbes such as bacteria and yeast use enzymes to make fuels from biomass. We use directed evolution to perfect those enzymes and make new fuels efficiently.
After returning from Cambridge in 1936, I did some work with J. M. Mioz on the oxidation of fatty acids in liver.
No human can design a good enzyme, yet we are surrounded by them after 3.5 billion years of work by evolution.
Our cells engage in protein production, and many of those proteins are enzymes responsible for the chemistry of life.
The ribosome is a machine that gets instructions from the genetic code and operates chemically in order to produce the product.
As can be seen even by this limited number of examples proteins carry out amazingly diverse functions.
If I could remember the names of all these particles, I'd be a botanist.
At the end of the 1970s, I was a young researcher at the Weizmann Institute with an ambitious plan to shed light on one of the major outstanding questions concerning living cells: the process of protein biosynthesis.
A living cell requires energy not only for all its functions, but also for the maintenance of its structure.
Hallucinogenic plants act as enzymes which stimulate imagination.
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.
When certain parts of our bodies are touched, certain enzymes and chemicals that trigger sexual desire are released into our system. The more our bodies are stimulated, the more chemicals are released and the greater our sexual desire grows until it becomes a virtually unstoppable flood.
Ultimately, life is a chemical interaction.
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.
The physiologist who succeeds in penetrating deeper and deeper into the digestive canal becomes convinced that it consists of a number of chemical laboratories equipped with various mechanical devices.
There are over 7,000 different types of proteins in typical eukaryotic cells; the total number depends on the cell class and function.
I was driven completely by a desire to understand how cells worked.
Using the power of protein engineering and evolution, we can convince enzymes to take what they do poorly and do it really well.
