Quotes About Cells

We have lots of Neanderthal parts around the lab. We are creating Neanderthal cells. Let's say someone has a healthy, normal Neanderthal baby. Well, then, everyone will want to have a Neanderthal kid. Were they superstrong or supersmart? Who knows? But there's one way to find out.

A neuron didn't know whether it fired in response to a scent or a symphony. Brain cells weren't intelligent; only brains were.

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In the early Sixties, having begun to describe the physiology of cells in the adult cat visual cortex, David Hubel and I decided to investigate how the highly specific response properties of cortical cells emerged during postnatal development.

It turns out that the very genes that turn on in cancer cells perform vital functions in normal cells. In other words, the very genes that allow our embryos to grow or our brains to grow, our bodies to grow, if you mutate them, if you distort them, then you unleash cancer.

Mom said, His spirit is there, and that made me really angry. I told her, Dad didn't have a spirit! He had cells! His memory is there. His memory is here, I said, pointing at my head. Dad had a spirit, she said, like she was rewinding a bit in our conversation. I told her, He had cells, and now they're on rooftops, and in the river, and in the lungs of millions of people around New York, who breathe him every time they speak!

Man is a creature composed of countless millions of cells: a microbe is composed of only one, yet throughout the ages the two have been in ceaseless conflict.

The adaptive immune system consists of lymphocytes and their products, such as antibodies.

But they also became us, and we will find them in the old bones and inside our own cells. We carry the past with us. There was no beginning, and there are no missing links, just the ebb and flow and ebb again of living through epochs. Those ancient people never went extinct—we just merged.

DNA also reveals behavior. Culture can become embedded in our cells just as it gets buried in the floors of caves, bogs, and dwellings.

There are no spaces in genes, but cells still understand the three-letter structure. De novo genes arise when a clump of letters is converted into a meaningful sentence by chance, and thus suddenly becomes understandable by the mechanics of the cell, and translated into a protein. The protein that results is utilised in some way. If it is used, then the organism that has acquired this new gene will pass it on.

On some peculiar pigmented cells found in two mosquitoes fed on malarial.

Man, like other organisms, is so perfectly coordinated that he may easily forget, whether awake or asleep, that he is a colony of cells in action, and that it is the cells which achieve, through him, what he has the illusion of accomplishing himself.

I believe that we are going to have a much deeper appreciation of what kinds of abnormalities in cancer cells and in the surrounding cells that feed and respond to cancers are vulnerabilities that will allow us to make better predictions of which kinds of drugs will work to treat these cancers.

Biology is a software process. Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells, each governed by this process. You and I are walking around with outdated software running in our bodies, which evolved in a very different era.

If you have pendulum clocks on the wall and start them all at different times, after a while the pendulums will all swing in synchronicity. The same thing happens with heart cells in a Petri dish: They start beating in rhythm even when they're not touching one another.

The subject I was best at in school was biology.

I like biology a lot.

But we live surrounded by paradoxes. One more shouldn't hurt us. The fact is simple enough. Through a lifetime, by ingesting food and water, we build cells, we grow, we become larger and more substantial. That which was not, is. The process is undetectable.

There were billions of conscientious body cells oxidating away day and night like dumb animals at their complicated job of keeping him alive and healthy, and every one was a potential traitor and foe.

Scientists inform us that you build a new body every eleven months; so from a physical standpoint you are really only eleven months old.

twenty-three chromosomes lie 3.2 billion ATCGs. All of this code equals one human genome, which you could print out in a very boring 6.4-million-page book. A strand of DNA is so thin (two molecules across) that if all of the chromosomes in a single cell were stretched

remote associations—"like when we think of 'table' and the idea of 'under the table'"—require more of a neural reach. The brain's right hemisphere, made up of cells with longer branches, is better suited for this task.

In all cases, life had already ceased for the patient. In fact, life had ceased before the code started. That was the time when the patient had stopped breathing or the heart had stopped beating. That was when the patient had really died. Yet we officially record the time of death as the moment when we adjourn our battle, not the moment the cells have adjourned theirs.