Paul Nurse

"How scientists go about their job: and it's a process, it's a question of asking questions, respecting observation, respecting experiment, having tentative explanations and then testing them.... There is a problem sometimes with how we teach science at schools. Because we sometimes teach it as if it has been chiseled in stone."

"Even at the level of the cell, phenomena such as general cellular homeostasis and the maintenance of cell integrity, the generation of spatial and temporal order, inter- and intracellular signalling, cell 'memory' and reproduction are not fully understood. ...This is also true for the levels of organization seen in tissues, organs and organisms, which feature more complex phenomena such as and operation of the immune and s."

"We need to focus more on how information is managed in living systems and how this brings about higher level biological phenomena... more investigation into how living systems gather, process, store and use information, as was emphasized at the birth of ."

"DNA can act as a digital information storage device that can be precisely copied. Similarly, the mechanism of the lac operon... can be described in terms of molecular interactions between DNA, protein and s. But these interactions make sense only when they are translated into a negative loop..."

"We need to describe the molecular interactions and biochemical transformations that take place in living organisms, and then translate these descriptions into the logic circuits that reveal how information is managed. This analysis should not be confined to the flow of information from to , but should also be applied to all functions operating in cells and organisms, including chemical interactions and transformations as well as physical phenomena, such as electrical signalling and mechanical processes."

"Ever since Sir Isaac Newton's times, scientists have worked in the same sort of way:"

"This notion of information being at the heart of life... is not restricted to me. I'm in good company. Sir Paul Nurse, former president of the Royal Society, in his visionary essay in Nature, "Life, Logic and Information", extols the virtues of thinking in an information, web-based way about life, and how, instead of worrying too much about what is going on at the molecular level, we should think of life as being a collection of logic modules... with information flowing between them, and control systems... a sort of engineering approach."