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One of the major lessons in all of biochemistry, cell biology and molecular medicine is that when proteins operate at the sub cellular level, they behave in a certain way as if they're mechanical machinery.
After realizing that we would eventually be able to build molecular machines that could arrange atoms to form virtually any pattern that we wanted, I saw that an awful lot of consequences followed from that.
Molecular collision dynamics has been a wonderful area of research for all practitioners. This is especially true for those who were following the footsteps of pioneers and leaders of the field twenty years ago.
Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise.
It turns out all molecular and biological systems have speeds of the atoms move inside them; the fastest possible speeds are determined by their molecular vibrations, and this speed is about a kilometre per second.
Basically, the body does have a vast amount of inbuilt anti-ageing machinery; it's just not 100% comprehensive, so it allows a small number of different types of molecular and cellular damage to happen and accumulate.
During the decade following the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA, the problem of translation - namely, how genetic information is used to synthesize proteins - was a central topic in molecular biology.
I've been around a long time, and I've been interested in memory for a long time. And one of my earlier interests in molecular biology of memory led me to define the switch that converts short term to long term memory.
The conservative statement is that telomere length is a biomarker, but it's probably not passive. There are some very intimate relationships between things such as molecular markers for inflammation and telomere health.
I would say that molecular gastronomy is a field of science. I would - I would say that it's probably lumped under chemistry, maybe. Because cooking, while it has certainly biology and some physics, it's mostly chemistry.
What I was concerned with was life: what are the major features that are common to all living organisms that subtly define life. So I looked at the whole problem as a chemist, as a biochemist, and as a molecular biologist.
Manufacturing takes place in very large facilities. If you want to build a computer chip, you need a giant semiconductor fabrication facility. But nature can grow complex molecular machines using nothing more than a plant.
Studying organisms at a molecular level was totally compelling because it was moving from being a naturalist, which was the 19th-century kind of science, to being very focused and really getting to the heart of these molecules.
The other advantage is that in conventional manufacturing processes, it takes a long time for a factory to produce an amount of product equal to its own weight. With molecular machines, the time required would be something more like a minute.
A potato can grow quite easily on a very small plot of land. With molecular manufacturing, we'll be able to have distributed manufacturing, which will permit manufacturing at the site using technologies that are low-cost and easily available.
It's terrifying the way molecular biology has become more and more jargon ridden. But I strongly believe that my book can be read by the intelligent layman. I want everyone who bought a copy of 'A Brief History of Time' to buy a copy of 'Genome'.
Cancer is like the common cold; there are so many different types. In the future we'll still have cancer, but we'll detect it very, very early, so that it won't kill anybody. We'll zap it at the molecular level decades before it grows into a tumor.
My lab looks at the ability of stress hormones to kill brain cells, and basically we are trying to understand on a molecular level how a neuron dies after a stroke, a seizure, Alzheimer's, brain aging, and what these stress hormones do to make it worse.
Although separating mitochondria and microsomes might appear worlds apart from the determination of the molecular weight of macromolecules, certain concepts were common to the two operations and could be usefully transposed from the latter to the former.
Owing to the difficulty of dealing with substances of high molecular weight we are still a long way from having determined the chemical characteristics and the constitution of proteins, which are regarded as the principal con-stituents of living organisms.
In 1995, I founded The Molecular Sciences Institute with a gift from the Philip Morris Company where I hoped that we could create an environment where young people could pursue science in an atmosphere of harmonious purpose and high intellectual challenge.
Chemical compounds of carbon can exist in an infinite variety of compositions, forms and sizes. The naturally occurring organic substances are the basis of all life on Earth, and their science at the molecular level defines a fundamental language of that life.
I love the chemistry that can be created onstage between the actors and the audience. It's molecular, even, the energies that can go back and forth. I started in theater, and when I first went into movies, I felt that my energy was going to blow out the camera.
In an age of molecular genomics, it is ever more apparent that the fingerprints of evolution are pressed deeply into human DNA, just as they are into the genomes of every other organism. Biologists understand this, and so do students who study the science of life.
Polymeric materials in the form of wood, bone, skin and fibers have been used by man since prehistoric time. Although organic chemistry as a science dates back to the eighteenth century, polymer science on a molecular basis is a development of the twentieth century.
Biology is far from understanding exactly how a single cell develops into a baby, but research suggests that human development can ultimately be explained in terms of biochemistry and molecular biology. Most scientists would make a similar statement about evolution.
According to the belief, molecules closer together than 200 nanometers could not be told apart with focused light. This is because, in a packed molecular crowd, the molecules shout out their fluorescence simultaneously, causing their signal, their voices, to be confused.
The fundamental importance of the subject of molecular diffraction came first to be recognized through the theoretical work of the late Lord Rayleigh on the blue light of the sky, which he showed to be the result of the scattering of sunlight by the gases of the atmosphere.
Evolution, cell biology, biochemistry, and developmental biology have made extraordinary progress in the last hundred years - much of it since I was weaned on schoolboy biology in the 1930s. Most striking of all is the sudden eruption of molecular biology starting in the 1950s.
Essentially, every technology you have ever heard of, where electrons move from here to there, has the potential to be revolutionized by the availability of molecular wires made up of carbon. Organic chemists will start building devices. Molecular electronics could become reality.
I decided to pursue graduate study in molecular biology and was accepted by Professor Itaru Watanabe's laboratory at the Institute for Virus Research at the University of Kyoto, one of a few laboratories in Japan where U.S.-trained molecular biologists were actively engaged in research.
Nature - how, we don't know - has technology that works in every living cell and that depends on every atom being precisely in the right spot. Enzymes are precise down to the last atom. They're molecules. You put the last atom in, and it's done. Nature does things with molecular perfection.
I began my thesis research at Harvard by working with a team in the laboratory of William N. Lipscomb, a Nobel chemistry Laureate, in 1976, on the structure of carboxypeptidase A. I did postdoctoral studies with David Blow at the MRC lab of Molecular Biology in Cambridge studying chymotrypsin.
When we consider the fact that nearly three-quarters of the surface of the globe is covered by oceanic water, we begin to realise that the molecular scattering of light in liquids may possess an astronomical significance, in fact contribute in an important degree to the observed albedo of the earth.
It is fortunate that molecular synthesis also serves the utilitarian function of producing quantities of rare or novel substances which satisfy human needs, especially with regard to health, and the scientific function of stimulating research and education throughout the whole discipline of chemistry.
My cooking philosophy, what I try to do, is to make a cuisine where the produce and the product shines, compared to some current trends that are maybe more adding additional things, like molecular cuisine, with a lot of additives and chemicals, which are now showing that they could be bad for your health.
Give us detailed, testable, mechanistic accounts for the origin of life, the origin of the genetic code, the origin of ubiquitous bio macromolecules and assemblages like the ribosome, and the origin of molecular machines like the bacterial flagellum, and intelligent design will die a quick and painless death.
Most people don't really like to pose. It is difficult to get them to be present and relaxed under this kind of molecular scrutiny. I want them to understand I'm not simply painting them: I am painting them within a precise moment in time, as a shadow moves across their eyebrows. Then it is gone. The moment is over.
The idea would be in my mind - and I know it sounds strange - is that the most important advances in medicine would be made not by new knowledge in molecular biology, because that's exceeding what we can even use. It'll be made by mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, figuring out a way to get all that information together.
During the 20th century, we came to understand that the essence of all substances - their colour, texture, hardness and so forth - is set by their structure, on scales far smaller even than a microscope can see. Everything on Earth is made of atoms, which are, especially in living things, combined together in intricate molecular assemblages.