Quotes About Nucleic acids

It's the pattern that matters, you see. Not the choice of building materials. Life is information, shaped by natural selection. Carbon's just fashion, nucleic acids mere optional accessories. Electrons can do all that stuff, if they're coded the right way. It's all just pattern.

Nucleic acids are the main information-carrying molecules of the cell, and, by directing the process of protein synthesis, they determine the inherited characteristics of every living thing. The two main classes of nucleic acids are deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA).

The spirit of a good woman cannot be coded by nucleic acids arranged in a double helix, and only an overeducated fool could think so.

Phoebus Levene was characteristically blunt: 'Nucleic acids carry no individuality, no specificity . . . It may be just to accept the conclusion of the biologist that they do not determine species specificity, nor are they carriers of the Mendelian characters.

It could simply have taken a procedure that didn't consist of words. As a fixed memory trace it's a protein structure. Like the head of a spermatozoon, or an ovum. After all, in the brain there aren't any words, feelings, the recollection of a person is an image written in the language of nucleic acids on megamolecular asynchronous crystals.

I think you can say that life is a system in which proteins and nucleic acids interact in ways that allow the structure to grow and reproduce. It's that growth and reproduction, the ability to make more of yourself, that's important.