biochemists

"I've been asked on various occasions, "Why don't we, as an origins of life community, get together, think what a killer experiment is, and then go and build a or something, where we go and do the experiment?" And the answer to that is... [W]e can't agree with each other about what experiment would you do? ...[I]t is intrinsically a lot more complex, precisely because it's a continuum. We don't know. We don't agree about what environment, we don't agree about what kind of chemistry or biochemistry. We can't join these things up, and so it seems to me a much healthier environment is to be deliberately multiple about it. Not to say, "Ok, this particular world view is going to dominate." I think we have to have multiple views until we know more."

"[A]cquiring mitochondria gives you a headache that can go wrong very easily, but here's an interesting problem in a nutshell. You look at a plant cell under a microscope, or an animal cell, or a fungal cell, or an or something, and you'll recognize the same structure in all of them. They've all got a nucleus. They've all got the s as straight chromosomes. They've all got s. They've all got s. They've all got complexes. They all do as a division mechanism. They all do as two steps where you first double everything and then half it twice. They all go through the same rigmarole. They've all got mitochondria. They've all got the same system, endoplasmic reticulum, things like that. ...[Y]ou could list page after page after page in a text book and it would be exactly the same for a plant, or a fungal cell, or an animal cell. Now they have really different ways of life. If you were to simply think, "Well, there's some inevitability that bacteria will give rise to complex life." ...You would imagine that a photosynthetic bacteria, a would give rise directly to photosynthetic , eukaryotic algae, but they didn't. It was by the intermediary of acquisition of a . There was a common ancestor of eukaryotes that was nothing like a cyanobacterium and nothing... quite like an algae except without the chloroplasts. So... why is it that we all have the same machinery inside, but we have such different lifestyles? Why don't we see multiple origins of complex life where cyanobacteria give rise to photosynthetic trees? Why don't we see predatory bacteria?"

"It's interesting... that life as a rule does not use UV radiation as an energy source, and the kind of chemistry that's being done using it doesn't resemble biochemistry as I know it... [T]he kind of environment that I'm talking about is deep sea s, and the question is, "Well, does it have to be deep sea? Could it... be same systems on land?" and they exist on land. They perfectly could. So it's perfectly feasible."

"[On the :] It's a bit of a sterile conversation. I suppose I think of it as the cell. That's not to say that it can't act at the level of s. Of course it can. It does all the time. Any selfish gene is acting in it's own interest. I think the trouble with looking at selection only at the level of genes is it tends to downplay the importance of genetic conflict in a strange way... [I]f you have levels of selection you can have, for example... mitochondria... They were bacteria once. They're the power packs inside eukaryotic cells... [O]nce they get inside another cell, inside another originally, then they have an agenda of their own. They're making copies of themselves, and it's the speed at which the bacterium as a whole is making a copy of itself that means whether it tends to dominate in the population or not. It's not the individual genes. They will tend to throw away genes that they don't really need. And the host cell itself has got its agenda. It needs to make sure that it's getting benefits from this symbiont. It's not being taken over. It's not being eaten, and so it's... more intuitive to think of the interests of the cells themselves. And if you simply think of all of them as genes then you don't have that discrimination between the layers. Again, if you're thinking about s at the origin of life, the unit of selection in my mind is, "Can a cell make a copy of itself?" If you have a pure RNA world..."

"[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..."

"I read some of those ideas years ago, , and thought it was thrilling. Over recent years I don't really see the need for a kind of genetic intermediary between an RNA level of genetic replication and some other form of replicator. ...[T]here's no suggestion that it's there in biology. There's no suggestion that I know from geology that is capable of giving rise to more complex systems, or to having an organic takeover. It seems to add in a layer of unnecessary complexity. So I much prefer to get straight into organic chemistry, and straight into as we know it."

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

"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."

"[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."

"From around the mid 1990s, researchers discovered that is... governed... by the mitochondria. ...[T]he failure to commit apoptosis is the root cause of cancer. ...In cancer, individual cells bid for freedom ...Without , the bonds that bind cells in complex s might never have ebvolved."

"This membrane, so vanishingly thin, looms large... for bacteria use it for generating their energy."

"In bacteria, the DNA forms into a long and twisted loop. The contorted tracks... close... to form a singular circular . In eukaryotic cells, there are usually a number of different chromosomes... each has two separate ends."

"[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."

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

"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."

"[N]o bacteria coat their DNA with s: their DNA is naked. The histones not only protect eukaryotic DNA from chemical attack, but also guard access to the genes."

"[T]here's a limit to just how far vents can take you... but... once you've gotten as far as , then you've freed yourself from a fairly small energy flow, a fairly tight and focused energy flow."

"It does seem to me, from our experience of life on earth that allows you to... step up, by probably orders of magnitude in just how much life can take over a planet."

"To me it [we] means life as a whole, so I would include bacteria in we. ...Life on earth is a whole, yes I think so. We share the . We share the same cell structures. I feel quite a strong fellow feeling with bacteria."

"If we, meaning humans now... find life somewhere else, most people would be disappointed if it turned out only to be bacteria."

"Now, if we get to complex life and we get beyond organic life forms into artificial intelligence, post-biological, then anything goes and maybe that's what we should be looking for."

"I would define complexity, not really as genetic complexity because if you take it purely as genetic complexity, E. coli... a single cell may have 4,000 genes but the metagenome, the pool of genes in E. coli around the place may be on the order to 30,000 or more... [T]hat's the level of complexity equivalent to the human genome, or even more complex than the human genome, but it's organized and structured in a different way. ...You might say that it's structured in a similar way to an ... but I think an ant colony has taken that level of Eusocial behavior a long way beyond anything you would see in E. coli. So I would define it as morphologically complex, meaning cells are larger and have a lot of stuff in them."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"(Students) take courses in science subjects……The practical component of the program may be dismissed in one phrase: subject to availability of funds…..The fact that finance is the main problem with respect to capacity building in the sciences is acknowledged…Yet, there has been no special initiative to find solutions to the problem. When it comes to science, we in Ghana want to go to heaven but we do not want to die."

"Education is a war against ignorance. Quality science education is not cheap. If we are serious about science education, we should declare war on ignorance and provide the necessary resources to fight it."

"When in 1993/94, during the planning of a televised quiz programme on science, I was asked to be the Quiz Mistress, I could not say No."

"Prof Addy was a strong advocate of women in science and a champion of the development of plant medicine who helped place the University of Ghana on the map of world scholarship."

"We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done."

"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."

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

"I have been working with the Nigerian branch of TWOWS (Third World Organization for Women in Science) to encourage women in their research projects and to encourage them to become leaders in our profession. At a meeting of this organization in Cape Town, South Africa I am proud to say that several other L'OREAL-UNESCO For Women in Science Laureates were in attendance. In fact, I took a tape of the 1998 ceremony to show everyone there that L'OREAL and UNESCO really are doing something for women in science."

"Even as a student I was already interested in helping girls enter science. At one time my plan was to provide scholarships to secondary school girls, but when I won the L'OREAL-UNESCO For Women in Science Award I began to aim much higher."

"Encourage women scientists to act as agents of change."

"Mother nature called on me to be a steward."

"Being responsible is more important than fighting. It's more enduring."

"The power of science is that people can prove that this wasn't done based on bias or someone's personal interests."

"I stayed to work in Niger Delta, because my mission is to make my country great."

"We also learn from them. They have planting techniques that we don't know - they teach us how to make the solution work in their area."

"We are not here for battle. We just want people to be responsible."

"We want solutions that are green and based on nature. We aim to do no harm in everything we do."

"Science is the bedrock of development. The way we live is a biological process. Young girls should be interested in science. Man can crack it; woman can crack it! We have to work hard for what we believe in."

"From pilot studies, we have reached 75% to 80% of heavy metals removal and this biological process can be repeated several times over until desired results are achieved."

"If you don't engage with people properly, you run the risk of being kidnapped. First I meet the community chief, the women's leader, the youth leaders."

"People get excited and feel like scientists, because they're working with us researchers to fix the problem."

"Crude oil has many components. In the soil, it leaves high concentration of heavy metals, which are inorganic and cannot be degraded by micro-organisms. The current practice by polluters is to use excavations, but that is only shifting the goal post. The goal is to reduce the contaminants to the barest minimum. Polluted land can become viable for agriculture again. I will study a similar process in Poland."

"When people push for a quota for a woman among invited speakers for example, I feel terrible as it is a conscious bias. In joint grant application preparation, many investigators think women should not be the Principal Investigators, citing society-assigned roles to women to manage welfare issues and not be a chief planner."

"Follow your dream. Your passion will sustain you through the thick and thin of science and do not forget to deliberately have mentors and champions. These individuals will always fan your flame into fire."