Biochemistry Best Quotes

I would not be among you to-night (being awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) but for the mentors, colleagues and students who have guided and aided me throughout my scientific life. I wish I could name them all and tell you their contributions. More, however, than anyone else it was the late Rudolf Schoenheimer, a brilliant scholar and a man of infectious enthusiasm, who introduced me to the wonders of Biochemistry. Ever since, I have been happy to have chosen science as my career, and, to borrow a phrase of Jacques Barzun, have felt that 'Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment'.

To be fair, later, when I read through the scientific literature, I realized this is not a failing of DuPont’s. It seems to be standard for scientists in this field, even the very best. They overwhelmingly focus on biochemistry and the brain. The questions Bruce and Gabor look at—how people use drugs out here on the streets—are ignored. Nobody, I kept being told, wants to fund studies into that. Why would this be? Professor Carl Hart at Columbia University is one of the leading experts in the world on how drugs affect the brain. He tells me that when you explain these facts to the scientists who have built their careers on the simplistic old ideas about drugs, they effectively say to you: “Look, man—this is my position. Leave me alone.” This is what they know. This is what they have built their careers on. If you offer ideas that threaten to eclipse theirs—they just ignore you. I ask Professor Hart: Can our central idea about drugs really be as hollow as that? “Can it be as hollow? I think you have discovered—it is as hollow as that . . . Look at the evidence. It’s hollow . . . It’s smoke and mirrors.” But why, then, do these ideas persist? Why haven’t the scientists with the better and more accurate ideas eclipsed these old theories? Hart tells me bluntly: Almost all the funding for research into illegal drugs is provided by governments waging the drug war—and they only commission research that reinforces the ideas we already have about drugs. All these different theories, with their radical implications—why would governments want to fund those?

The dream of every cell is to become two cells’ said François Jacob, the most lyrical revolutionary of molecular biology. No cell lives the dream so wholly or so senselessly as a cancer cell, turning dream to nightmare. Nothing else captures the myopic immediacy of natural selection so starkly. The moment is all that matters for selection: there is no foresight, no balance, no slowing at the prospect of doom. Just the best ploy for the moment, for me, right now, not for the many, and often mistaken. Cancer cells die in piles, necrotic flesh worse than the trenches. The decimated survivors mutate, evolve, adapt, exploit their shifting environment, selfish to the bitter end. Their horror is that they know no bounds. They will eat away at our flesh to fuel their pointless lives and deaths, until, if we are unlucky, they take us too. I am writing about cancer, but must confess that I have the pointless greed and destruction of humanity at the back of my mind. May we find it within ourselves to be better than cancer cells.

that needs to be reached in order to tip the balance toward APP’s anti-Alzheimer’s pathway. What this means is that you don’t have to address all thirty-six holes. When you have patched enough of them, the rest aren’t serious enough to let much water into your house. If we leave our roofing analogy to get back to Alzheimer’s, the presence of a few of the factors nudging APP down the Alzheimer’s-causing pathway isn’t enough to exert that nudge in enough of your brain neurons enough of the time to cause Alzheimer’s. Unfortunately, we don’t yet have a simple way to measure how many of the thirty-six each person can safely live with, and each hole is a different size for each person, depending on his/her genetics and biochemistry, so it’s best to address as many as you can until you see improvement. This is in fact what happens in the treatment of cardiovascular disease. When you address enough of the key pathophysiological parameters, like lowering your blood levels of triglycerides and reaching a healthy weight, you reverse cardiovascular disease, eliminating arterial plaque, as Dr. Dean Ornish has shown. Even if you do not patch all of the cardiovascular holes—maybe you still have an imperfect diet or some mild stress

Human biochemistry works at its best at around 98 degrees F, and while adaptation to living in and visiting different environments is possible, from the Mojave to the moon, adaptation to altered body core temperatures is not possible.

No one meat for us to be miserable. We actually make "happy hormones" in our brains. These are designed to make us feel good. But there are many things that can turn off these hormones, just as there are many things that can turn them on. And the amount of happy hormones you make in the brain is directly related to the type of diet you ingest. The difficulty is that we are all different in our biochemistry, and hence, also unique in what foods make us the happiest. In other words, many people feel really mellow and content on a high carbohydrate (vegan or alkaline) diet. Many use this to optimize their athletic performance. While others are carnivores, not vegans, and feel best with meat (acid diet) at every meal. They get weak and lower their zip if they lower their meat content.