Quotes & Sayings About Cell Division

You don't want to inhibit cell division. You want to inhibit cell division in the cancer cells, and even that is not really where you want to do it. You actually want to destroy the cancer cells, which is a different matter altogether. Just stopping them isn't enough - you really want to kill them. — Tim Hunt

Men are even worse: a hundred rounds of cell division are needed to make sperm, with each round linked inexorably to more mutations. Because sperm production goes on throughout life, round after round of cell division, the older the man, the worse it gets. As the geneticist James Crow put it, the greatest mutational health hazard in the population is fertile old men. — Nick Lane

In revolving these matters, while she undressed, it suddenly struck her as not unlikely, that she might that morning have passed near the very spot of this unfortunate woman's confinement - might have been within a few paces of the cell in which she languished out her days; for what part of the Abbey could be more fitted for the purpose than that which yet bore the traces of monastic division? — Jane Austen

The nucleic acids, as constituents of living organisms, are comparable In importance to proteins. There is evidence that they are Involved In the processes of cell division and growth, that they participate In the transmission of hereditary characters, and that they are important constituents of viruses. An understanding of the molecular structure of the nucleic acids should be of value In the effort to understand the fundamental phenomena of life. — Linus Pauling

You're instantly in a bind once you arrive here on earth, of need, self-will, a body and a separate personality, even before teh crippling self-consciousness kicks in, even before the seventh grade ... you're fucked at cell division ... it's all downhill from there. After that, it's all survival, and trying to keep yourself either entertained or convinced that the things you're obsessed with are of any importance at all in the big scheme. — Anne Lamott

They also knew that there was a string of DNA at the end of each chromosome called a telomere, which shortened a tiny bit each time a cell divided, like time ticking off a clock. As normal cells go through life, their telomeres shorten with each division until they're almost gone. Then they stop dividing and begin to die. This process correlates with the age of a person: the older we are, the shorter our telomeres, and the fewer times our cells have left to divide before they die. By the early nineties, a scientist at Yale had used HeLa to discover that human cancer cells contain an enzyme called telomerase that rebuilds their telomeres. The presence of telomerase meant cells could keep regenerating their telomeres indefinitely. This explained the mechanics of HeLa's immortality: telomerase constantly rewound the ticking clock at the end of Henrietta's chromosomes so they never grew old and never died. — Rebecca Skloot

Cell division allows us as organisms to grow, to adapt, to recover, to repair - to live. And distorted and unleashed, it allows cancer cells to grow, to flourish, to adapt, to recover, and to repair - to live at the cost of our living. Cancer cells grow faster, adapt better. They are more perfect versions of ourselves. — Anonymous

Every day in the human body, some 10 billion cells die and are replaced by new cells. The cells that die do not meet a violent unpremeditated end, but are removed silently and unnoticed by apoptosis, all evidence of their demise eaten by neighbouring cells. This means that apoptosis balances cell division — Nick Lane

The extracellular genesis of cells in animals seemed to me, ever since the publication of the cell theory [of Schwann], just as unlikely as the spontaneous generation of organisms. These doubts produced my observations on the multiplication of blood cells by division in bird and mammalian embryos and on the division of muscle bundles in frog larvae. Since then I have continued these observations in frog larvae, where it is possible to follow the history of tissues back to segmentation. — Robert Remak