Quotes About Biology

It will be in the convergence of evolutionary biology, developmental biology and cancer biology that the answer to cancer will lie. Nor will this confluence be a one-way street.

The stress response is incredibly ancient evolutionarily. Fish, birds and reptiles secrete the same stress hormones we do, yet their metabolism doesn't get messed up the way it does in people and other primates.

Chronic emotional stress shortens your telomeres.

Well, much of my research over the years has been on stress, and the adverse effects of stress on the health of the central nervous system. All things considered, I've been astonishingly unhelped by my own research.

I think most people will tell you that. They can go along and, while they're denying that they are addicted, say it's stress this, it's this, it's that. But I - it's - I think - I really believe there is a gene. Some people become addicted and others don't.

We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours.

Some cultural phenomena bear a striking resemblance to the cells of cell biology, actively preserving themselves in their social environments, finding the nutrients they need and fending off the causes of their dissolution.

I have a strong feeling that the subject of evolution is beautiful without the excuse of creationists needing to be bashed.

It struck me what we should be trying to do was pluck the egg from the ovary and fertilise it in the laboratory. We could do this in animals increasingly... this was the way to go in the human species.

Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow struck by this simple experiment.

It was Max Perutz who inspired me to go into structural biology when he gave a lecture at Harvard in 1963. As soon as I heard him talk, I decided that this is what I want to do.

Much of what we now consider 'personality' will be explained away as structural and chemical functions of the brain.

The time of night when you sleep makes a significant difference in terms of the structure and quality of your sleep.

He told me that Francis Crick and Jim Watson had solved the structure of DNA, so we decided to go across to Cambridge to see it. This was in April of 1953.

The basic structure of proteins is quite simple: they are formed by hooking together in a chain discrete subunits called amino acids.

Although Darwin was able to persuade much of the world that a modern eye could be produced gradually from a much simpler structure, he did not even attempt to explain how the simple light sensitive spot that was his starting point actually worked.

No naturalist has devoted more painstaking attention to the structure of the barnacles than Mr. Darwin.

Serum albumin is a well-defined protein, but no laboratory has yet attempted to ascertain its full chemical structure.

We may know the chemical structure of medicinal drugs, but we frequently have a very incomplete understanding of how they work.

Bone is one of the hardest structures of the animal body; it possesses also a certain degree of toughness and elasticity.

In many biological structures proteins are simply components of larger molecular machines.

The muscles are connected with the bones, cartilages, ligaments, and skin, either directly or through the intervention of fibrous structures called tendons or aponeuroses.

The pancreas is by far the most complex organ in the body.

The vesicles of the spleen, which form one of the most important elements of this organ in its mature state, are not developed until the period of incubation is near to its completion.