biochemists

"A previous publication reported the occurrence of in the eyes of all rats fed on rations containing as the chief source of . Negative results with other carbohydrates tested led to an investigation of as the next logical step. This sugar was fed to young rats at 35% and 25% levels corresponding to the galactose available from the 70% and 50% lactose rations fed in previous experiments. Four rats on the 35% galactose ration developed mature bilateral cataract in 12, 14, 14, and 37 days respectively (average 19 days), whereas those on the 25% galactose ration were somewhat more delayed. The average time for the development of mature bilateral cataract in 49 rats fed the 70% lactose ration was 10 weeks, approximately 4 times as long. Controls fed on the 70% starch ration showed no eye changes."

"Remember that there were no in the 1920's, and every had to depend on a few recognized authorities for estimates of needs of children. In 1923, called attention ... to the protein needs for optimal growth in rats which he estimated to be about 15 per cent of the calories. He contrasted that with which provides only 7 per cent of the calories in the form of protein, to provide for the growth of the infant. He also emphasized what and had demonstrated earlier that animal proteins were more efficient for growth than plant proteins."

"... Even minor during the growing period may prevent full potential growth from being attained. ... Growth potential is not a thing that can be speeded up and lowed down and still obtain the same end results. According to ..., if one does not use the full potential alI the way along, one does not achieve full development. The same ultimate weight may be reached but not the ideal shape and composition. If the rate of growth is sufficiently slowed down, the adult is not only smalI but under-developed with normal or nearly normal head size, moderately retarded trunk and relatively short legs."

"(quote from p. 521)"

"The best thing that has ever happened to me is becoming a mother and entering into a personal relationship with the Almighty Father through Jesus Christ."

"My research into yams, which originated in Nigeria and was fostered in Germany, became buttressed in Jamaica and has since radiated out to many parts of the world, resulting in many UWI-trained PhD scholars."

"Jamaica can really run with yam. In fact, Jamaica should be in a position where, at the next Olympics, we have bombarded the market with yam products. The world is looking out for that."

"I am very happy, now more motivated. I feel there is now more to do because people are asking questions. I feel that there is a long road to travel and we have only just started."

"My own belief is that science remains the most powerful tool we have yet generated to apply leverage for our future. It is the instrument which is most useful for guiding our own destinies, for assuring the condition of man in the years to come. I have much to hope that we will not abandon that tool, leaving us to our own brute devices."

"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."

"I grew up in a family that so much cherished matooke as a food crop and as a child, I started developing a special attachment to the same. However, I later realized that there was not much literature or research done on matooke."

"By adding value, farmers can sustainably produce bananas as a food and to increase income."

"The establishment of BIRDC has presented to Uganda an opportunity to showcase a variety of tooke products with a unique taste and full nutritional value on the world market. The products exported are branded in such a way that promotes our country and culture on the international scene."

"Uganda is among the top five leading banana producers in the world, with a 30% estimated contribution to the world banana production."

"Matooke is a very starchy food, more so even than maize or potatoes. We realised we could do more with matooke flour than with maize, if you add matooke flour to wheat or maize flour, you get a better product. With its nutrients it can be used as an alternative to wheat."

"... More explicitly than ever before the modern principles of physical science seem to compel us to recognized absolute mechanical necessity in all things. We may not understand organic regulations, or organic evolution, or the origin of life; in fact we are still unable with the necessary clearness to represent to ourselves the structure of a cell; yet theses are at least phenomena. As phenomena they are subject to the two laws of thermodynamics. For the laws of conservation and degradation of energy have long since supplanted Leibniz's rudimentary idea of the conservation of ', as the ground of our conception of necessary causation."

"Four centuries ago, Machiavelli was thinking of certain great problems of human society and writing two famous books. In so doing he reached scientific generalizations about the influence of the sentiments upon the actions of men and, through these actions, upon the fate of human societies. As a whole, these conclusions stand; but from this great and ingenious work of Machiavelli's almost no developments have followed. The science of statecraft and of the influence of the sentiments upon human behavior is little different to-day from what it was in in the 16th century."

"It is in proportion to our success or failure in conceiving facts simply that sciences are abstract or concrete, rational or descriptive. In these respects the contrast is great between the physical and the biological sciences. The figure of the earth, its path about the sun, and its relations to the other planets are readily conceivable in a first approximation as simple; but the forms of life seem complex, their activities manifold, and the concatenations interminable. Therefore, unlike celestial mechanics, the science of biology, which is the record of efforts accurately to describe and clearly to understand living things, is chiefly a science descriptive of concrete fact. It bears little resemblance to the more perfect science and as yet is in no danger of a relativist revolution. It has never attained, perhaps, as some have argued, it can never in any respect achieve and should not strive for the abstractness, the elegance, and the simplicity which are the mark of the classical epoch of many the physical sciences and the ideal of those who follow Newton and Willard Gibbs."

"Climate change" affects more than just a change in the weather; it refers to seasonal changes over a long period of time"

"Climate change is a phenomenon that has come to stay with the world, so the public needs to be educated on the nature and how to cope with the situation"

"Basically, it means that we can reach out to the vulnerable community to provide them with basic health care; and on our high agenda is also dealing with malaria, tuberculosis, HIV. So, these are some of the critical areas that the ministry is dealing with; and of course, public health. And when we talk about public health, we are talking about prevention, we’re talking about information and also we’re talking about immunization and then also dealing with epidemics our readiness to combat epidemics as it surfaces."

"In Ghana, we have some priority; we’re looking at access to quality health care and then we’re also looking at maternal and child health care; we’re looking at providing skilled medical personnel, doctors, nurses, midwives, to support maternal and child care. Then we’re also looking at strengthening community health centres across the country which we call the chip compounds."

"We must work together as a team – both developing countries and the developed countries. And I think that the issue of knowledge sharing is very, very important because these days, viruses, bacteria, they don’t know whether you’re a developing country, or you’re a developed country. Looking at the various epidemics, that, we’re experiencing all over the world. So, this is the time that we need to forge together, work together, share our knowledge and then also help regional institutions with common focus to enable us fight the disease burden."

"I mean a lot of African countries cannot meet the AU requirement of 15% of your GDP"

"I think that, my expectations from this conference, is that, we must be able to have a good leverage when it comes to health issues"

"Well, I think, yes, he will still achieve his zero level tolerance towards corruption. I think it’s something that happened about two to three years ago. And the Ministry of Health, we have instituted an enquiry into the importation into the country of these fake condoms, the culprits are going to be dealt with and we’ll make sure that the policies regarding inspection and importation of, not only condoms but medicines, and any medical logistics would be strengthened."

"Knowledge not only has to be compiled and presented, it also has to actually reach people. We worked on how we expressed ourselves, and always remained as objective as possible. Knowledge from other disciplines helped us communicate."

"[A]fter a decade of careful , it looks as if all known eukaryotic cells either have or once had... mitochondria."

"[T]he mechanism by which mitochondria generate energy, by pumping protons across a membrane (), is found in all forms of life... It's a bazarre way... This idea, however... won Peter Mitchell a Nobel Prize..."

"[Life is] a continuum. I think there are some phase transitions, probably, and the origin of... genetic information is probably one of them. ...[W]e are doing some modeling work to try and work out how evolvable... a geological system [can] be along the path to getting to cell-like things that... most people would understand as life. How far can you go down that line before you have genetic inheritance? ...[A] long way, but you get to a point where... it's no longer evolvable. ...[I]n our modeling, you can get to a point where you're capable of producing s capable of making copies of themselves with a degree of sophistication, but getting beyond that, to specializing to different niches and so on, I don't see the way, without genetic inheritance."

"Mitochondria are a badly kept secret. ...There are usually hudreds or thousands of them in a single cell, where they use oxygen to burn up food. ...[O]ne billion ...would fit comfortably on a grain of sand."

"Different species have transferred different genes to the nucleus, but all species with mitochondria have... retained... the same core contingent of mitochondrial genes."

"The information encoded in DNA spells out the molecular structure of s. This, said Crick, is the 'central dogma' of all biology: genes code for proteins."

"I deliberately avoid having... [a working definition of life]. What I quote... is... from Peter Mitchell... a pioneer... of... , that essentially all cells, with very very few exceptions, are powered by... proton gradients across the membrane. So on one side of the membrane surrounding the cell you've got the high concentration on the inside, a low proton concentration [on the outside]. Protons are... the positively charged nuclei of atoms, so... [y]ou're pumping them out and... putting a charge on the membrane... That's as universally conserved across life on earth as the itself, which implies, as a mechanism, it's very early... [I]t's not something anyone ever predicted. It's not something that... emerges from a chemical understanding of the biochemistry of cells."

"I'm... interested in the principles of what governs the emergence of life on the planet, with a certain set of resources. Can we understand it? We'll never know what happened, so we'll never know how life started on earth. ...[I]f those principles are enormously difficult, if it turns out that it's a freak statistical accident, then there's little point in studying it and we will gain... very little. If, on the other hand, those principles are reasonable, intelligible, that we can study them in the lab and demonstrate that the steps that we propose are plausible and... we can demonstrate it, then I think that's as close to understanding the origin of life [as] we can get. ...[I]f those principles are generalizable, then as a scientist, that's... a pleasing thing. I'm not sure there's any more that's more pleasing to me, personally as a scientist."

"We also have a power to destroy the earth, and... it's probably unique. ...Destroy ourselves, destroy a large part of life in earth, not the bacteria... If we take ourselves out, we'll give it five million years and it will be indistinguishable, apart from ourselves."

"[W]e can't agree among ourselves, as an origins of life community, what were the conditions... under which life arose on earth. ...Within the field itself, probably the leading candidate... would be terrestrial geothermal systems, starting with and powered by UV radiation. There's been a lot of rather beautiful chemistry... in a terrestrial environment in some kind of geothermal pool... and cyanide chemistry, it works well as chemistry. The problem I have with that is that it doesn't link up very well to biochemistry of cells. I'm a biochemist and I would like to see some continuity between and , and there's not much there, to me. That doesn't mean that it's wrong. It's just that... [I] would like to see some continuity."

"They [bacteria] haven't used it [their more complex metabolism]... to give rise to more complex morphologies beyond the kind of stromatolite type structures, beyond s. That seems to be a limit. Some multicellularity, some degree of differentiation and complexity, but nothing... to compare with the flea."

"The sequence of letters in a specifies the sequence of s in a protein. If the sequence of letters is changed—a —this may change the structure of the protein (...not always, there is some redundancy... technically degeneracy..—several combinations... can code for the same amino acid.)"

"I think we share consciousness right across... not just even the animal world. I would see it going down even to the level of cells, some kind of flickering of consciousness. So I don't feel alone on earth, but I do think that there is something different about humans."

"What does life do then? ...it seems reasonable that the earliest forms of life were ic... [i.e.,] they grew from gases... found in normal geological environments through an energy flux which is equivalent to cells which we see today, which is to say, what all life does today. There's a very simple phrase from Mike Russell... "hydrogenate CO2"... [i.e.,] add onto to make organic molecules. That is the structure of in cells, and different cells can get hydrogen from all kinds places. They can strip it out of water. They can get it from , but it also comes bubbling out of the ground as hydrogen gas, and that seems to be the simplest form of life imaginable as... life on earth. It's reacting hydrogen and CO2, and they don't react easily. The way that cells make them react... is to effectively use an electrical charge on a ... [T]here are environments like deep sea s that provide... for free with an equivalent electrical charge across a barrier, and I think... that's the way to see the question."

"[W]hy is metabolism structured this way? There has to be thermodynamic underpinnings for it, otherwise it wouldn't happen. It had to have arisen in the absence of genes... in my mind and therefore there must be environments which are favoring protocells with this kind of metabolism, making copies of themselves... In my mind they have to get better at it, otherwise RNA is just never going to appear."

"Yes I do think that... [viruses] are alive, not for the obvious reasons. ...I was invited to do some filming with the BBC... it was about cells, but they'd been asked to tell a story... about the viral infection of a cell, and I said, "Well I don't know anything about viruses," and they said "No, we just want to know a little bit about early evolution," and I said, "Great, I can talk about early evolution in cells, but I can't really talk about viruses." ...[T]hey said "OK, no problem," and they flew me out to Iceland to some black sand beach that I think had been used in some science fiction movie, and they said "Right, so Nick, what can you tell us about how viruses... drove the early evolution of life?" and I said, "Oh God, guys, come on!" and they said, "No, this is a film about viruses." So I had to think quickly... What I found myself saying was that viruses were parasitic on their environment and can afford to be very simple because their environment is very rich. They live inside cells. Everything that they need is provided for them, but plants are parasitic on their environment. They still need CO2. They still need water. They still need light. ...I wouldn't hesitate to call it [parasitism] a definition of life... [L]ife as a rule is parasitic on its environment, and the level of parasitism depends on the sophistication of the environment. So in that sense viruses use the richness of their local environment to make copies of themselves and they behave with the kind of low cunning that's characteristic of life. So I think of them as alive, yes."

"That's a question about the meaning of life... Why are we here? What are we doing? What's important to us? Why should we struggle to do anything, and I think most of the answers to those questions lie within society itself. ...I don't see a greater meaning, that we've been put here as a species, that we're exceptional in any way. We're just another species. We're very much similar to pretty much everything else, and I think what we've done that's good has been the achievement of society as a whole... [A] lot of people within society... humans have a need for an origins myth, and that origins myth, if it happens to bear some semblance to reality, I think a lot of people are genuinely interested to know what can we say about the origins of the Universe, about the origins of the solar system, about the origins of life. ...[C]an we as ...puny-brained humans come to, through logic, through experiments, through thinking about it, through observations, come to an explanation for how life came to be. It's a grand question. It would be wonderful to know the answer. I think a lot of people would love to know that answer, and I personally would love to know that answer, even if my own views on the subject turn out to be completely wrong."

"Viruses are quite sophisticated in the sense that they're forming virion particles and they're infecting other cells... s and things... selfish genes, I suppose in the broadest sense."

"[T]he contends that ageing and many of... [its associated] diseases... are caused by... free radicals leaking from mitochondria during normal . ...As they burn up food using oxygen, the free-radical sparks escape to damage adjacent structures ...Many cruel inherited conditions... are linked with mutations caused by free radicals attacking mitochondrial genes."

"According to mitochondrial gene analysis, man didn't interbreed with Homo Sapiens..."

"[L]ife will probably get stuck in a bacterial rut elsewhere in the universe... we might not be alone, but will almost certainly be lonely."

"[W]e are biochemically quite simple in comparison bacteria. Simpler than bacteria. In terms of our metabolic biochemistry we are really limited. ...[W]e have ...across the entire domain of s, about the same degree of metabolic sophistication as a single bacterial cell."

"[[Bacteria|[B]acteria]], the simplest of cells, are... so complex that we still have almost everything to learn about their invisible organization."