Nobel Laureates In Physiology Or Medicine

"Microbes are the unsung heroes of life on Earth."

"Microbiology offers an understanding of the hidden world of microbes that is essential for understanding our own biology."

"Microbes have been shaping the course of evolution since the beginning of life."

"The biodiversity of microbes far exceeds that of all other organisms combined."

"Microbial communities are like intricate ecosystems, with each member playing a unique role."

"The purpose of science is to develop a shared understanding of the natural world."

"The ability of microbes to adapt and evolve is unparalleled in the natural world."

"Microbes hold the key to solving many of our pressing global challenges, from disease eradication to sustainable agriculture."

"From the tiniest single-celled organisms to complex microbial communities, microbes hold immense scientific value and hold the secrets to the origins of life."

"Microbiology is a field where curiosity meets application, paving the way for meaningful scientific advancements."

"Through the study of microbes, we can unlock the secrets of life itself."

"Microbes provide the foundation for all life on Earth."

"By studying microbes, we can gain insights into our own biological processes and potentially unlock new therapeutic approaches."

"The study of microbes is a never-ending journey of discovery."

"The evolution of life forms required billions of years for the first steps."

"Microbes don't just cause diseases, they also play critical roles in the health of our planet."

"From the most remote landscapes to the depths of the ocean, microbes are everywhere."

"The central dogma of molecular biology: DNA makes RNA makes protein."

"Microbes have been shaping the course of human history, from the development of agriculture to the prevention and treatment of diseases."

"Every microbial species discovered is a new piece of the puzzle in understanding life's complexity"

"Microbes are the true masters of adaptation, constantly evolving to overcome challenges."

"Microbes are the ultimate survivors, capable of thriving in some of the most extreme environments on Earth."

"We must recognize the interconnectedness of all living things if we are to truly understand life."

"The Genome Project has been a great adventure. It began as the dream of a few visionaries, was embraced by the entire scientific community, and achieved its goals with the cooperation of public and private institutions. This is the true story of a great scientific achievement in our time. The secret of its success includes many factors. The main one was the absolute dedication of many scientists, who believed they could achieve their goal despite the scarcity of technical means available. These means were quickly developed, such as new and fully automated technologies to determine the organisation of DNA, trace genes, read the messages they contain and their meanings. New approaches were used to determine gene activity, exploring the entire genome in a single step. The contribution of information technology has been extraordinary in this progress."

"My greatest contribution to biology was bringing Dulbecco."

"I believe the benefits of two civilizations – a European education followed by the freedom and opportunities of this country – have been essential to whatever contributions I have been able to make to science."

"This day relenting God Hath placed within my hand A wondrous thing; and God Be praised. At his command, Seeking His secret deeds With tears and toiling breath, I find thy cunning seeds, O million-murdering Death. I know this little thing A myriad men will save, O Death, where is thy sting? Thy victory, O Grave?"

"These scientists, once young and eager, had become gnomes grappling hopelessly with problems far beyond their reach."

"Implicit in the devotion to purifying enzymes, is the faith of a dedicated biochemist of being able to reconstitute in a test tube anything a cell can do."

"Evolution is a tinkerer, not an engineer."

"The dream of every cell is to become two cells."

"Gurdon's (1962) nuclear transplantation experiments showed that genes were neither lost nor permanently inactivated during development. Upon transfer of an intestinal cell nucleus into an enucleated egg, entire swimming tadpoles developed. However, the frequency of this event was low, unless nuclei were first injected into oocytes (DiBerardino et al., 1986), a step that might allow reprogramming by stripping the DNA of mitotically heritable regulatory influences. Thus, although these experiments provided strong evidence that differentiation was reversible, they did not determine whether genes were silenced by active or passive mechanisms in the course of development."

"Cells specialise in ways determined by the concentration of signal that they receive ... The best example of signaling between cells is by the signal molecule activin, discovered in embryos by Makoto Asashima and J. C. Smith."

"For these early results in Xenopus to be reproduced in mammals took nearly 40 years (Campbell et al. 1996; Wilmut et al. 1997) in sheep. A very important feature of these first successful mammalian nuclear transfer in sheep was the use of unfertilised eggs, as was actually used in amphibia. Earlier work with mice (McGrath and Solter 1984) used fertilised eggs. Although fertilised eggs can be used (Egli et al. 2007), synchronisation between nucleus and egg is harder to achieve than with the use of unfertilised eggs. A very elegant and important experiment that confirmed the general principle that cell differentiation proceeds with the retention of a complete set of genes was carried out using nuclei with a rearranged genome from mature mouse B or T donor cells (Hochedlinger and Jaenisch 2002). In the course of time, somatic cell nuclear transfer to eggs has been successful in the eggs of mice and other mammals (Wakayama et al. 1998). In each species there seem to be some technical requirements which have to be identified and overcome."

"My own view of development is that one has to try to narrow things down to single entities, whether it's a cell or a nucleus or a molecule, and I'm often ridiculed because I always ask people what concentration their molecule is at, and they'll say that it doesn't matter. I'd say that concentration and time are the two critical things in development. You need to know the concentration, and you need to know how long it has to be there to make a difference – because for cells, a particular concentration of a molecule for a few seconds may not be the same as that concentration for 10 minutes. So I would take the view that what we really lack in developmental biology at the moment is any ability to determine the concentration of proteins, analogous to the measurement of nucleic acids using PCR."

"Michail Fischberg was well aware of the value of genetics in developmental biology, and when I joined him, he had just started using Xenopus as a laboratory animal, on the grounds that it could be grown to sexual maturity within a year and that, as it is wholly aquatic, it is easy to keep in the laboratory. Xenopus can deliver eggs throughout the year, in contrast to the limited-season availability of eggs from Rana and European newts, the organisms of choice for European embryologists. The history of how a frog that naturally occurs only in Africa has come to be one of the half-dozen most used animals for research is bizarre (Gurdon & Hopwood 2000)."

"As long as I have been in science, which is let's say 1960 to today, just about every five years there are major changes in technology that allow you to do things that you previously either said were just too hard or there was no way to do them — or which you hadn't imagined that you could ever do."

"This milestone of biology's megaproject is the long-promised draft DNA sequence from the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium (the public project). The sequence itself is available to all those connected to the Internet … In the paper in this issue, we are presented with a description of the strategy used to decipher the structures of the huge DNA molecules that constitute the genome, and with analyses of the content encoded in the genome. It is the achievement of a coordinated effort involving 20 laboratories and hundreds of people around the world. It reflects the scientific community at its best: working collaboratively, pooling its resources and skills, keeping its focus on the goal, and making its results available to all as they were acquired."

"The prominence of Watson and Crick and the Phage Group made Baltimore all the more desperate to do some real experimental biology. During the spring of his junior year, Baltimore became president of the Biology Club and enrolled in a microbiology seminar that discussed the advances of Luria, Delbrück, Lederberg, and others. But he was sick of just talking about biology. He had understood very quickly that designing and completing experiments were the accomplishments that make a biologist; gathering an encyclopedia knowledge of facts simply makes a good student."

"Two independent groups of investigators have found evidence of an enzyme in virions of RNA tumour viruses which synthesizes DNA from an RNA template. This discovery, if upheld, will have important implications not only for carcinogenesis by RNA viruses but also for the general understanding of genetic transcription: apparently the classical process of information transfer from DNA to RNA can be inverted."

"The world of animal viruses appears to offer an unfathomable diversity of specimens, but, as the molecular biology of the replication of many viruses has been studied, a pattern of behavior has emerged. The viruses can be divided into classes, each of which has its own method of transmitting its genetic information from one generation to the next and its own style of expressing its genetic information. Although in some cases the data are still fragmentary, it is possible to outline the behavior of these systems and to place them in a formal scheme."

"Viral genomes must make mRNA that can be read by host ribosomes ... David Baltimore (Nobel laureate) used this insight to describe a simple way to think about virus genomes ... The original Baltimore scheme missed one genome type: the gapped DNA of the Hepadnaviridae ..."

"We were witnessing the birth of a new era in endocrinology, one that started with Yalow."

"We cannot expect in the immediate future that all women who seek it will achieve full equality of opportunity. But if women are to start moving towards that goal, we must believe in ourselves or no one else will believe in us; we must match our aspirations with the competence, courage and determination to succeed."

"Initially, new ideas are rejected. Later they become dogma, if you’re right. And if you’re really lucky you can publish your rejections as part of your Nobel presentation."

"We still live in a world in which a significant fraction of people, including women, believe that a woman belongs and want to belong exclusively in the home."

"If chromosomes are broken by various means, the broken ends appear to be adhesive and tend to fuse with one another 2-by-2. This has been abundantly illustrated in the studies of chromosomal aberrations induced by X-ray treatment. It also occurs after mechanical rupture of ring-shaped chromosomes during somatic mitoses in maize and is assumed to occur during the normal process of crossing-over."

"When, through radiation or other causes, chromosomes are broken within a single nucleus, 2-by-2 fusions may occur between the broken ends. These fusions may lead to rearrangements of parts of the chromatin complement, giving rise to various chromosomal aberrations which are detected as reciprocal translocations, inversions, deficiencies, etc. Since, in the well-investigated cases, the breakages occurred within a single nucleus, the conditions that lead to fusions of broken ends could not easily be ascertained."

"When Barbara McClintock was awarded a Nobel Prize for her work on gene transposition in corn plants, the most striking thing about her was that she made her discoveries by listening to what the corn spoke to her, by respecting the life of the corn and "letting it McClintock says she learned "the stories" of the plants. She "heard them. She watched the daily green journeys of growth from carth toward sky and sun. She knew her plants in the way a healer or mystic would have known them, from the inside, the inner voices of corn and woman speaking to one another. As an Indian woman, I come from a long history of people who have listened to the language of this continent, people who have known that corn grows with the songs and prayers of the people, that it has a story to tell, that the world is alive...This intuitive and common language is what I seek for my writing, work in touch with the mystery and force of life, work that speaks a few of the many voices around us, and it is important to me that McClintock listened to the voices of corn. It is important to the continuance of life that she told the truth of her method and that it reminded us all of where our strength, our knowing, and our sustenance come from. It is also poetry, this science, and I note how often scientific theories lead to the world of poetry and vision, theories telling us how atoms that were stars have been transformed into our living, breathing bodies. And in these theories, or maybe they should be called stories, we begin to understand how we are each many people, including the stars we once were, and how we are in essence the earth and the universe, how what we do travels clear around the earth and returns. In a single moment of our living, there is our ancestral and personal history, our future, even our deaths planted in us and already growing toward their fulfillment. The corn plants are there, and like all the rest we are forever merging our borders with theirs in the world collective."

"In 1950, Barbara McClintock published a Classic PNAS article, “The origin and behavior of mutable loci in maize,” which summarized the evidence leading to her discovery of transposition. The article described a number of genome alterations revealed through her studies of the Dissociation locus, the first mobile genetic element she identified. McClintock described the suite of nuclear events, including transposon activation and various chromosome aberrations and rearrangements, that unfolded in the wake of genetic crosses that brought together two broken chromosomes 9. McClintock left future generations with the challenge of understanding how genomes respond to genetic and environmental stresses by mounting adaptive responses that frequently include genome restructuring."