British Biochemist Quotes

Hans Adolf Krebs

Alexander R. Todd

Joseph Needham

Paul Nurse

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

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.

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.

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

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