20th-century Biochemist Quotes

Albert Szent-Györgyi

Hans Adolf Krebs

Alexander R. Todd

John Kendrew

Alexander Oparin

Christian de Duve

Gerhard Domagk

We can look high or we can look low in books or in journals, but the result is the same. The scientific literature has no answers to the question of the origin of the immune system.

The kind of questions we ask is conditioned by the kind of answers we expect.

Life is either a reproducible, almost commonplace manifestation of matter, given certain conditions, or a miracle. Too many steps are involved to allow for something in between.

Christian de Duve

The community as a whole doesn't listen patiently to critics who adopt alternative viewpoints. Although the great lesson of history is that knowledge develops through the conflict of viewpoints. If you simply have a consensus, it generally stultifies. It fails to see the problems of that consensus and it depends on the existence of critics to break up that iceberg and permit knowledge to develop. This is in fact one of the underpinnings of democratic theory. It is one of the reasons why we believe in notions of free speech and it's one of the great forces in terms of intellectual development.

Neither evolution nor creation qualifies as a scientific theory.

"Security" is a reality only where there is true peace between neighbors, as in the case of Holland/Belgium, Sweden/Norway, the United States/Canada. In the absence of peace there is no security, and no geographic-strategic settlement on the land can change this. There is no direct link between security and the territories.

Yeshayahu Leibowitz

We were fortunate to have the Russians as our childhood enemies. We practiced hiding under our desks in case they had the temerity to drop a nuclear weapon.

Ever since Sir Isaac Newton's times, scientists have worked in the same sort of way: They show a great respect for experiment and observation; They don't cherry pick data;
They take a skeptical approach to what they do; And then scientists work together to get a consensus as to what should be believed; And that generates very reliable knowledge and that reliable knowledge drives innovation.

I am tired of hearing that the DNA in my cells nucleus is the complete blueprint of what is, or could be, me. There is more to me than that. The sequence of my nuclear DNA is not "My Genome."

Gottfried Schatz

Every biologist has at some time asked "What is life?" and none has ever given a satisfactory answer. Science is built on the premise that Nature answers intelligent questions intelligently; so if no answer exists, there must be something wrong with the question.

Albert Szent-Györgyi

For the past 15 years at ever faster rates we have been digitizing biology. By that I mean going from the analog world of biology through DNA sequencing into the digital world of the computer.

The first living organisms on Earth doubtless arose in an aqueous environment, and the course of evolution has been shaped by the proper ties of the aqueous medium in which life began.

Albert L. Lehninger

I am an organic chemist, albeit one who adheres to the definition of organic chemistry given by the great Swedish chemist Berzelius, namely, the chemistry of substances found in living matter, and my science is one of the more abstruse insofar as it rests on concepts and employs a jargon neither of which is a part of everyday experience. Nevertheless, organic chemistry deals with matters of truly vital Importance and in some of its aspects with which I myself have been particularly concerned it may prove to hold the keys to Life itself.

Alexander R. Todd

Rejoice when other scientists do not believe what you know to be true. It will give you extra time to work on it in peace. When they start claiming that they have discovered it before you, look for a new project.

Organization and Energy are the two fundamental problems which all science has to solve.

We are at the dawn of a new era, the era of 'molecular biology' as I like to call it, and there is an urgency about the need for more intensive application of physics and chemistry, and specially of structure analysis, that is still not sufficiently appreciated.

William Astbury

Strength that has effort in it is not what you need; you need the strength that is the result of ease.

First, nutrition is the master key to human health. Second, what most of us think of as proper nutrition--isn't.

T. Colin Campbell

The world amazed me, in that I saw it as I had when I was a child. I had forgotten the beauty and the magic and the knowingness of it and me.

Alexander Shulgin

Brains, like cabbages, are beautiful-but in a different way. Cabbage heads are dumb and sterile, whereas brains are personal, intelligent and vibrant.

Carl Pfeiffer (pharmacologist)

No living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth.

In no other field of scientific endeavor do otherwise intelligent people feel free to make public claims based on prejudice and ignorance. Yet in relation to psychic phenomena, committed materialists feel free to disregard the evidence and behave irrationally and unscientifically, while claiming to speak in the name of science and reason. They abuse the authority of science and bring rationalism into disrepute.

Rupert Sheldrake

Biology has become a mature science as it has become precise and quantifiable. The biologist is no less dependent upon his apparatus than the physicist.

Life, after all, is only chemistry, in fact, a small example of chemistry observed on a single, mundane planet.

Arthur Kornberg

It has now become quite clear that the origin of life was not the result of some "happy chance" as was thought till quite recently, but a necessary stage in the evolution of matter. The origin of life is an inalienable part of the general process of the development of the universe and, in particular, the development of the earth.

Alexander Oparin