Molecular Biology Quotes

• Molecular biology is essentially the practice of biochemistry without a license.

  Erwin Chargaff

  Science, Practice, Molecules

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• 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.

  Paul Berg

  Transition, Becoming, Genes

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• One can say, looking at the papers in this symposium, that the elucidation of the genetic code is indeed a great achievement. It is, in a sense, the key to molecular biology because it shows how the great polymer languages, the nucleic acid language and the protein language, are linked together.

  Francis Crick

  Keys, Dna, Achievement

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

  John Pople

  Development, Biology, Observers

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• The blooming of a flower is, in my mind, not a miracle. It's something that we can understand on the basis of molecular biology these days.

  Francis Collins

  Flower, Miracle, Mind

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved by probably some kind of Darwinian means to a very, very high level of technology- and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. And I suppose it's possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer.

  Richard Dawkins

  Mean, Technology, Civilization

  "Atheist Richard Dawkins makes some startling comments on religion". www.glennbeck.com. August 27, 2012.

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• It is now widely realized that nearly all the 'classical' problems of molecular biology have either been solved or will be solved in the next decade. The entry of large numbers of American and other biochemists into the field will ensure that all the chemical details of replication and transcription will be elucidated. Because of this, I have long felt that the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other fields of biology, notably development and the nervous system.

  Sydney Brenner

  Lying, Numbers, Long

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• The major credit I think Jim and I deserve ... is for selecting the right problem and sticking to it. It's true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold, but the fact remains that we were looking for gold. Both of us had decided, quite independently of each other, that the central problem in molecular biology was the chemical structure of the gene. ... We could not see what the answer was, but we considered it so important that we were determined to think about it long and hard, from any relevant point of view.

  Francis Crick

  Science, Thinking, Discovery

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• The big idea we start with is: "How is the genome interpreted, and how are stable decisions that affect gene expression inherited from one cell to the next?" This is one of the most competitive areas of molecular biology at the moment, and the students are reading papers that in some instances were published this past year. As a consequence, one of the most common answers I have to give to their questions is, "We just don't know."

  Shirley M. Tilghman

  Reading, Knowledge, Past

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• As an adult I discovered that I was a pretty good autodidact, and can teach myself all kind of things. And developed a great interest in a number of different things from how to build a street hot rod from the ground up to quantum mechanics, and those two different kinds of mechanics, and it was really in the sciences, quantum mechanics, molecular biology, I would begin looking at these things looking for ideas, but in fact you don't read it for ideas you read it for curiosity and interest in the subject.

  Dean Koontz

  Ideas, Two, Numbers

  "The Rumpus Interview With Dean Koontz". Interview with Ben Pfeiffer, therumpus.net. December 21, 2015.

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• There are living systems; there is no'living matter'.

  Jacques Monod

  Matter, Biochemistry

  1967 Lecture, College of France.

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• What's been gratifying is to live long enough to see molecular biology and evolutionary biology growing toward each other and uniting in research efforts.

  E. O. Wilson

  Long, Effort, Research

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• 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.

  Michael Denton

  Men, Cells, Atoms

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• The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer engineering journal.

  Richard Dawkins

  Differences, Engineering, Machines

  Richard Dawkins (1995). “River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life”, Basic Books (AZ)

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

  Ian Hacking

  Taken, Wings, Ideas

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• If belief in evolution is a requirement to be a real scientist, it’s interesting to consider a quote from Dr. Marc Kirschner, founding chair of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School:
  “In fact, over the last 100 years, almost all of biology has proceeded independent of evolution, except evolutionary biology itself. Molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology, have not taken evolution into account at all.

  Marc Kirschner

  Real, Taken, School

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• The major credit I think Jim and I deserve is for selecting the right problem and sticking to it. It's true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold, but the fact remains that we were looking for gold.

  Francis Crick

  Thinking, Vision, Gold

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• We know from astronomy that the universe had a beginning, from physics that the future is both open and unpredictable, from geology and paleontology that the whole of life has been a process of change and transformation. From biology we know that our tissues are not impenetrable reservoirs of vital magic, but a stunning matrix of complex wonders, ultimately explicable in terms of biochemistry and molecular biology. With such knowledge we can see, perhaps for the first time, why a Creator would have allowed our species to be fashioned by the process of evolution.

  Kenneth R. Miller

  Magic, Paleontology, Tissues

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

  Bill Gates

  Book, Favourite, Genes

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• The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy, but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences.

  Daniel Dennett

  Paleontology, Branches, Evolution

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• I also suspect that many workers in this field [molecular biology] and related fields have been strongly motivated by the desire, rarely actually expressed, to refute vitalism.

  Francis Crick

  Desire, Fields, Motivated

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• Biology is far from understanding exactly how a single cell develops into a baby, but research suggests that human development can ultimately be explained in terms of biochemistry and molecular biology. Most scientists would make a similar statement about evolution.

  Kenneth R. Miller

  Baby, Cells, Understanding

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• I can see no practical application of molecular biology to human affairs... DNA is a tangled mass of linear molecules in which the informational content is quite inaccessible.

  Frank Macfarlane Burnet

  Dna, Tangled, Molecules

  "Immunological Surveillance". Book by Burnet, F.M., Pergamon Press, pp. 240-241, 1970.

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• These days vampires gravitated toward particle accelerators, projects to decode the genome, and molecular biology. Once they had flocked to alchemy, anatomy, and electricity. If it went bang, involved blood, or promised to unlock the secrets of the universe, there was sure to be a vampire around.

  Deborah Harkness

  Blood, Secret, Vampire

  Deborah Harkness (2014). “All Souls Trilogy”, p.26, Penguin

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• We know evolution happened not because of transitional fossils such as A. natans but because of the convergence of evidence from such diverse fields as geology, paleontology, biogeography, comparative anatomy and physiology, molecular biology, genetics, and many more.

  Michael Shermer

  Anatomy And Physiology, Paleontology, Fields

  Michael Shermer (2007). “Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design”, p.51, Macmillan

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