I've spent more time than many will believe [making microscopic observations], but I've done them with joy, and I've taken no notice those who have said why take so much trouble and what good is it?
It's a parts list... If I gave you the parts list for the Boeing 777 and it had 100,000 parts, I don't think you could screw it together and you certainly wouldn't understand why it flew
What is true for E. coli is also true for the elephant
The world becomes full of organisms that have what it takes to become ancestors. That, in a sentence, is Darwinism
Shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life?
Nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life in such a way that it's impossible to determine the line of demarcation
Cells let us walk, talk, think, make love, and realize the bath water is cold
In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history
It is my belief that the basic knowledge that we're providing to the world will have a profound impact on the human condition and the treatments for disease and our view of our place on the biological continuum
Imagine a house coming together spontaneously from all the information contained in the bricks: that is how animal bodies are made
A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct
The stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny jigs, springs, hinges, rods, sheets, magnets, zippers, and trapdoors, assembled by a data tape whose information is copied, downloaded and scanned
We wish to discuss a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid. (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biologic interest
We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget
The systems approach to biology will be the dominant theme in medicine
I've always been interested in animal behavior, and I keep reading about it because it's so surprising all the time - so many things are happening around us that we neglect to look at. Part of the passion I have for biology is based on this wonderment"
Because all of biology is connected, one can often make a breakthrough with an organism that exaggerates a particular phenomenon, and later explore the generality
Nothing in Biology makes sense except in the light of evolution
Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries; and biology is likely to remain the biggest part of science through the twenty-first century
Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third