Biochemist Quotes

Albert Szent-Györgyi

Hans Adolf Krebs

Frederick Gowland Hopkins

Otto Fritz Meyerhof

John Kendrew

Alexander R. Todd

Alexander Oparin

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.

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.

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

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.

I must admit that when I chose the name, "vitamine," I was well aware that these substances might later prove not to be of an amine nature. However, it was necessary for me to choose a name that would sound well and serve as a catchword, since I had already at that time no doubt about the importance and the future popularity of the new field.

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)

One individual alone creates only a note or so that blends with those produced by others.

Marshall Warren Nirenberg

In principle, one by one, the difficulties of explaining living systems in terms of chemistry and physics disappear. "In principle" are the operative words. In practice the difficulties remain great and seem insurmountable in the foreseeable future. But, from the point of view of the theory of knowledge, there is nevertheless a decisive difference.

Hans Adolf Krebs

Science. I'm afraid, Dr. Noitall, you do not have any understanding of statistics.

Daniel E. Koshland Jr.

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

No philosopher's or poet's fancy, no myth of a primitive people has ever exaggerated the importance, the usefulness, and above all the marvelous beneficence of the ocean for the community of living things.

Lawrence Joseph Henderson

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

Now Time's Andromeda on this rock rude, With not her either beauty's equal or Her injury's, looks of by both horns of shore Her flower, her piece of being, doomed dragon's food.

Frederick Gowland Hopkins

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 drive and urge to explore nature in all its facets is one of the most important functions of humanity.

Fritz Albert Lipmann

Life, like the first blooming, emerges tantalizing to the curious: Why, How, When, Where; Interlocked questions arising from the mysterious encompassing matters quite serious.

It is often the scientist's experience that he senses the nearness of truth when such connections are envisioned. A connection is a step toward simplification, unification. Simplicity is indeed often the sign of truth and a criterion of beauty.

Mahlon Hoagland

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

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

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.

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.

"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

Truly, the history of oxygen is the history of life!

No man discovers, except by accident, who isn't inquisitive.

William John Gies

It is possible to know thermodynamics without understanding it.

Richard E. Dickerson