Quotes & Sayings About Biochemistry

He knew about alcohol, nothing about this. He could drink and he could stop. Others couldn't and drank themselves dead. Personal biochemistry. Fate. "I — Robert J. Wolfe

In trying to evaluate Hopkins' unique contribution to biochemistry it may perhaps be said that he alone amongst his contemporaries succeeded in formulating the subject. Among others whose several achievements in their own fields may have surpassed his, no one has ever attempted to unify and correlate biochemical knowledge so as to form a comprehensible picture of the cell and its relation to life, reproduction and function. — Marjory Stephenson

Information and complexity go hand in hand. — Lee Spetner

My knowledge of biochemistry told me the chemical composition of the potion (ingredients, strickly confidential)... — Carlos Malvar

The inhibition of an inhibitor leads to the activation of an inhibitor of an inhibitory pathway. This is the point where most people might be tempted to give up on biochemistry! — Chris Cooper

Happier thoughts lead to essentially a happier biochemistry. A happier, healthier body. — John Hagelin

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. — Aaron Ciechanover

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

Some of these guys will go on walking long after the laws of biochemistry and handicapping have gone by the boards. There was a guy last year that crawled for two miles at four miles an hour after both of his feet cramped up at the same time, you remember reading about that? Look at Olson, he's worn out but he keeps going. That goddam Barkovitch is running on high-octane hate and he just keeps going and he's as fresh as a daisy. I don't think I can do that. I'm not tired -not really tired- yet. But I will be." The scar stood out on the side of his haggard face as he looked ahead into the darkness "And I think ... when I get tired enough ... I think I'll just sit down — Stephen King

But nothing ever put 'Hoppy' in the shade. No one could fail to recognize in the little figure ... the authentic gold of intellectual inspiration, the Fundator et Primus Abbas of biochemistry in England. — Joseph Needham

I think if people are passionate about something, it could be real estate or biochemistry, and that spark gets turned on in them, everyone's beautiful in that zone. — Cindy Crawford

On the other hand, the sun of Naples might be conducive to learning something about the biochemistry of the embryonic development of marine animals. — James D. Watson

Placebos can be astonishingly effective, especially for colds, anxiety, depression, pain, and symptoms that are plausibly generated by the mind. Conceivably, endorphins - the small brain proteins with morphinelike effects - can be elicited by belief. A placebo works only if the patient believes it's an effective medicine. Within strict limits, hope, it seems, can be transformed into biochemistry. As — Carl Sagan

Inborn errors of metabolism. — Archibald Garrod

As we returned to Argentina, I started seriously to work towards a doctoral degree under the direction of Professor Stoppani, the Professor of Biochemistry at the Medical School. — Cesar Milstein

I have never been disappointed upon asking microorganisms for whatever I wanted. — Kinichiro Sakaguchi

Her death contributed to my later interest in studying biochemistry, an interest that has not been fulfilled in the sense that my accomplishments remain more at the basic than the applied level. — Paul D. Boyer

Ascribing personal responsibility to the obese individual is not a rational argument for an eminently practical reason: it fails to advance any efforts to change it. The obesity pandemic is due to our altered biochemistry, which is a result of our altered environment. — Robert H. Lustig

I floated around in the department of biochemistry and learned some interesting things, and then I began to ... I never wanted to work with a mentor because I always wanted to have my own reputation and be free to do what I wanted to do. So I worked with the weakest people in the department. Don't make that public. — Irwin Rose

Geochemistry gives rise seamlessly to biochemistry. — Nick Lane

The detox phenomenon is interesting because it represents one of the most grandiose innovations of marketers, lifestyle gurus, and alternative therapists: the invention of a whole new physiological process. In terms of basic human biochemistry, detox is a meaningless concept. It doesn't cleave nature at the joints. There is nothing on the "detox system" in a medical textbook. That burgers and beer can have negative effects on your body is certainly true, for a number of reasons; but the notion that they leave a specific residue, which can be extruded by a specific process, a physiological system called detox, is a marketing invention. — Ben Goldacre

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

It is one of the more striking generalizations of biochemistry - which surprisingly is hardly ever mentioned in the biochemical textbooks - that the twenty amino acids and the four bases, are, with minor reservations, the same throughout Nature. — Francis Crick

Evolution, cell biology, biochemistry, and developmental biology have made extraordinary progress in the last hundred years - much of it since I was weaned on schoolboy biology in the 1930s. Most striking of all is the sudden eruption of molecular biology starting in the 1950s. — John Tyler Bonner

After taking my B.A. degree in 1939 I remained at the University for a further year to take an advanced course in Biochemistry, and surprised myself and my teachers by obtaining a first class examination result. — Frederick Sanger

When conventional medicine fails, when we must confront pain and death, of course we are open to other prospects for hope.
And, after all, some illnesses are psychogenic. Many can be at least ameliorated by a positive cast of mind. Placebos are dummy drugs, often sugar pills. Drug companies routinely compare the effectiveness of their drugs against placebos given to patients with the same disease who had no way to tell the difference between the drug and the placebo. Placebos can be astonishingly effective, especially for colds, anxiety, depression, pain, and symptoms that are plausibly generated by the mind. Conceivably, endorphins -the small brain proteins with morphine-like effects - can be elicited by belief. A placebo works only if the patient believes it's an effective medicine. Within strict limits, hope, it seems, can be transformed into biochemistry. — Carl Sagan

If minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. — C.S. Lewis

(Please excuse my lack of depth; I'm a generalist, not a specialist. Why bother learning all that biochemistry stuff - or how to design a building, or conn a boat, or balance accounts, or solve equations, or comfort the dying - when you can get other people to do all that for you in exchange for a blow job?) — Charles Stross

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

BLINDSIGHT is fearless: a magnificent, darkly gleaming jewel of a book that hurdles the contradictions inherent in biochemistry, consciousness, and human hearts without breaking stride. — Elizabeth Bear

All life on earth shares a common genetic code and basic biochemistry. We share genes with peas. — Anonymous

The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself - not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs. Inferring that biochemical systems were designed by an intelligent agent is a humdrum process that requires no new principles of logic or science. It comes simply from the hard work that biochemistry has done over the past forty years, combined with consideration of the way in which we reach conclusions of design every day. — Michael J. Behe

You are following Jesus and shaping our world in the power of the Spirit. And when the final consummation comes, the work that you have done - whether in Bible study or biochemistry, whether in preaching or in pure mathematics, whether in digging ditches or in composing symphonies - will stand, will last.

The fact that we live between, so to speak, the beginning of the End and the end of the End, should enable us to come to terms with our vocation to be for the world that Jesus was for Israel, and in the power of the Spirit to forgive and retain sins. — N. T. Wright

The biochemistry and biophysics are the notes required for life; they conspire, collectively, to generate the real unit of life, the organism. The intermediate level, the chords and tempos, has to do with how the biochemistry and biophysics are organized, arranged, played out in space and time to produce a creature who grows and divides and is. — Ursula Goodenough

There is a close analogy between organic chemistry in its relation to biochemistry and pure mathematics in its relation to physics. — Robert Robinson

Molecular machines display a key signature or hallmark of design, namely, irreducible complexity. In all irreducibly complex systems in which the cause of the system is known by experience or observation, intelligent design or engineering played a role in the origin of the system ... We find such systems within living organisms. — Scott A. Minnich

At university - when I was supposed to be studying biochemistry - I had tried to write a children's book about a boy and a wolf cub, and there was a paragraph in that which was from the wolf's point of view. — Michelle Paver

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

Love is a momentary upwelling of three tightly interwoven events: First, a sharing of one or more positive emotions between you and another; second, a synchrony between your and the other person's biochemistry and behaviors; and third, a reflected motive to invest in each other's well-being that brings mutual care — Barbara Fredrickson

I have no degree in biochemistry, neither do I have one in mechanical engineering, as the Army saw fit to terminate both courses before they were finished. — Kurt Vonnegut

It was a big surprise when I started to get attention in Sweden, going from biochemistry studies to touring and living from music only. There were a couple of years while I went to university when I was OK with thinking of music as just a nice recreation. — Jose Gonzalez

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

My interest in protein breakdown as a research problem began in l955 at about the time I joined the Biochemistry Department of Yale University. It was known that proteins break down intracellularly in the mature animal. — Irwin Rose

Beyond natural history Other biological sciences take up the study at other levels of organization: dissecting the individual into organs and tissues and seeing how these work together, as in physiology; reaching down still further to the level of cells, as in cytology; and reaching the final biological level with the study of living molecules and their interactions, as in biochemistry. No one of these levels can be considered as more important than any other. — Marston Bates

I went to Duke University in the medical track. And then I decided I wanted to do something more creative, so I switched to biochemistry at Nebraska. — Ken Wilber

Many of our young people spend four years getting very expensive college degrees. But our universities fail them and the nation if they continue to graduate students with expertise in biochemistry, mathematics or history without teaching them to think about what problems are important and why. — Heather Wilson

We walked to another door with an amber light above it. This one led to a hall I hadn't seen before. It was less pristine than the others. There were whiteboards on the walls, scribbled with notes about cafeteria menus and security sweeps. There were even a few flyers taped up, advertising cars for sale or asking if anyone knew a good tutoring service for high school biochemistry. It looked so much more real than the place I'd been since I woke up, so much more human, that it almost made my chest hurt. The world still existed. I'd died and come back, and the whole time I was gone, the world continued. — Mira Grant

It is one of the striking generalizations of biochemistry - which surprisingly is hardly ever mentioned in the biochemical text-books - that the twenty amino acids and the four bases, are, with minor reservations, the same throughout Nature. As far as I am aware the presently accepted set of twenty amino acids was first drawn up by Watson and myself in the summer of 1953 in response to a letter of Gamow's. — Francis Crick

You have to make your own condensed notes. You learn from MAKING them. A lot of thinking goes into deciding what to include and exclude. You develop your own system of abbreviations and memory methods for the information. — Peter Rogers

An unexpected benefit of my career in biochemistry has been travel. — Paul D. Boyer

I chose biochemistry as my major and graduated after 4 years with an Honours degree in Biochemistry. During that time, I had come to love biochemistry research, although I was just getting my feet wet in laboratory research. — Elizabeth Blackburn

The mechanist is intimately convinced that a precise knowledge of the chemical constitution, structure, and properties of the various organelles of a cell will solve biological problems. This will come in a few centuries. For the time being, the biologist has to face such concepts as orienting forces or morphogenetic fields. Owing to the scarcity of chemical data and to the complexity of life, and despite the progresses of biochemistry, the biologist is still threatened with vertigo. — Andre Michel Lwoff

The war project at Stanford was essentially completed, and I accepted an offer of an Assistant Professorship at the University of Minnesota, which had a good biochemistry department. — Paul D. Boyer

biochemistry tells us that there is no receptor for calories, that is, no way for cells to sense how many calories are coming in, only how much of each type of macronutrient. The available chemical energy will ultimately show up but there is no reason to think that there will be a direct relation between calories and weight gain or loss. Calories do count but not in a simple way. — Richard David Feinman

When the sex is persuasively rendered, it tends to read autobiographically, and there are limits to my desire for immersion in a stranger's biochemistry. — Jonathan Franzen

In the 21st century our tastes buds, our brain chemistry, our biochemistry, our hormones and our kitchens have been hijacked by the food industry. — Mark Hyman

Humanity shares a common ancestry with all living things on Earth. We often share especially close intimacies with the microbial world. In fact, only a small percentage of the cells in the human body are human at all. Yet, the common biology and biochemistry that unites us also makes us susceptible to contracting and transmitting infectious disease. — Brenda Wilmoth Lerner

A romantic kiss is the perfect fusion of science and mythology--the scientific account of the biochemistry of saliva and the countless muscles and nerves involved on one side, and the mythic actual experience of the kiss on the other. — Vic Cavalli

At the level of their biochemistry, the barrier between bacteria and complex cells barely exists. — Nick Lane

During this time (at high school) I discovered the Public Library ... It was here that I found a source of knowledge and the means to acquire it by reading, a habit of learning which I still follow to this day. I also became interested in chemistry and gradually accumulated enough test tubes and other glassware to do chemical experiments, using small quantities of chemicals purchased from a pharmacy supply house. I soon graduated to biochemistry and tried to discover what gave flowers their distinctive colours. I made the (to me) astounding discovery that the pigments I extracted changed their colours when I changed the pH of the solution. — Sydney Brenner

To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn't seem to give a very full picture of the world. — Rupert Sheldrake

If you put sexual attraction on a scale of one to ten, where ten equals "you can't keep your hands off each other,"five equals "you can take it or leave it," and one equals "repulsed," to support a vibrant relationship, it should be at least a seven, preferably an eight, nine, or ten. With work, you might raise the attraction one notch, but because there is so much biochemistry involved in sexual attraction, it's hard to do much more than that. So if a sexual attraction doesn't evolve, remember, it's not anyone's fault and it's just the what is of your pairing, and you might make better friends than lovers.

Sexual attraction doesn't have to be instantaneous on first meeting, but it must eventually flower because it provides a basic glue for successful conjugal union. If we're not sexually alive to our beloved, it often leads to a subdued relationship, loneliness, affairs, or lots of fantasies. — Charlotte Kasl

The world is too complicated in all parts and interconnections to be due to chance alone. I am convinced that the existence of life with all its order in each of its organisms is simply too well put together. Each part of a living thing depends on all its other parts to function. How does each part know? How is each part specified at conception? The more one learns of biochemistry the more unbelievable it becomes unless there is some type of organizing principle-an architect. — Allan Sandage

If you stimulate seizures in an animal every day, the seizures eventually become automatic; the animal will go on having them once a day even if you withdraw the stimulation. In much the same way, the brain that has gone into depression a few times will continue to return to depression over and over. This suggests that depression, even if it is occasioned by external tragedy, ultimately changes the structure, as well as the biochemistry, of the brain. — Andrew Solomon

See yourself living in a new body. Hopeful = recovery. Happy = happier biochemistry. Stress degrades the bod. — Rhonda Byrne

As a progressive discipline [biochemistry] belongs to the present century. From the experimental physiologists of the last century it obtained a charter, and, from a few pioneers of its own, a promise of success; but for the furtherance of its essential aim that century left it but a small inheritance of facts and methods. By its essential or ultimate aim I myself mean an adequate and acceptable description of molecular dynamics in living cells and tissues. — Frederick Gowland Hopkins

Changing from biochemistry to law was easy because I was rubbish in the laboratory. I could never decide how much to put in a test tube because I'm not very good at maths. — Michelle Paver

I would not be among you to-night (being awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) but for the mentors, colleagues and students who have guided and aided me throughout my scientific life. I wish I could name them all and tell you their contributions. More, however, than anyone else it was the late Rudolf Schoenheimer, a brilliant scholar and a man of infectious enthusiasm, who introduced me to the wonders of Biochemistry. Ever since, I have been happy to have chosen science as my career, and, to borrow a phrase of Jacques Barzun, have felt that 'Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment'. — Konrad Bloch

Beadle believed that genetics were inseparable from chemistry-more precisely, biochemistry. They were, he said, "two doors leading to the same room." — Warren Weaver

Molecular biology is essentially the practice of biochemistry without a license. — Erwin Chargaff

By the time I was 12 or 13, I was studying biochemistry textbooks. — Joshua Lederberg

In Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Jekyll & Hyde,' the hero decides on the terms of his transformation in a process that's explained not through the supernatural but the natural or, at least, through biochemistry. — Joshua Cohen

One of the major lessons in all of biochemistry, cell biology and molecular medicine is that when proteins operate at the sub cellular level, they behave in a certain way as if they're mechanical machinery. — James Rothman

The quality of your life is dependent upon the quality of the life of your cells. If the bloodstream is filled with waste products, the resulting environment does not promote a strong, vibrant, healthy cell life-nor a biochemistry capable of creating a balanced emotional life for an individual. — Tony Robbins

Mind, in the way I use the word, is not just thought. It includes your emotions as well as all unconscious mental-emotional reactive patterns. Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is the body's reaction to your mind - or you might say, a reflection of your mind in the body. For example, an attack thought or a hostile thought will create a buildup of energy in the body that we call anger. The body is getting ready to fight. The thought that you are being threatened, physically or psychologically, causes the body to contract, and this is the physical side of what we call fear. Research has shown that strong emotions even cause changes in the biochemistry of the body. These biochemical changes represent the physical or material aspect of the emotion. Of course, you are not usually conscious of all your thought patterns, and it is often only through watching your emotions that you can bring them into awareness. — Eckhart Tolle

In marked contrast to the University of Wisconsin, Biochemistry was hardly visible at Stanford in 1945, consisting of only two professors in the chemistry department. — Paul D. Boyer