Life's Greatest Secret Quotes

“Since the nineteenth century it has been known that, in a closed system, energy will dissipate until it reaches a constant and even level: physicists explain this in terms of increasing amount of disorder, or entropy, that inevitably appears in such systems. Organisms seem to go against this fundamental law because we are highly ordered forms of matter that concentrate energy in a very restricted space. Schrödinger's explanation was that life survives ´by continually sucking orderliness from its environment´ - he described order as ´negative entropy´. This apparent breach of one of the fundamental laws of the Universe does not cause any problems for physics, because on a cosmological scale our existence is so brief, our physical dimensions so minute, that the iron reality of the second law does not flutter for an instant. Whether life exists or not, entropy increases inexorably. According to our current models, this will continue until the ultimate heat death of the Universe, when all matter will be evenly spaced and nothing happens, and it carries on not happening forever.”
― Matthew Cobb, Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code

“As Jacob put it in 1977, natural selection does not design, it tinkers with what is available.”
― Matthew Cobb, Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code

“The genetic code is a product of biology and is messy, illogical and inelegant. It is highly redundant, but to bewilderingly varied degrees: one amino acid (leucine) has six codons, whereas another (tryptophan) has only one.”
― Matthew Cobb, Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code

“In typically generous fashion, Crick was offering Nirenberg the opportunity to step into history as the man who had cracked the genetic code.”
― Matthew Cobb, Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code

“Part of the problem was that no one knew exactly how a cell took a nucleic acid sequence and turned it into a blob of protein made up of amino acids.”
― Matthew Cobb, Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code

“If the adaptor hypothesis were true (and it was), this meant that the role of DNA and RNA would be reduced to simply carrying genetic information: they had no direct structural role as templates; they were merely a medium”
― Matthew Cobb, Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code

“In fact they are historical, carrying the baggage of their evolutionary past, and have not been designed at all. They are often far from logical, nor are they generally elegant. They work, and that is enough.”
― Matthew Cobb, Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code

“Genes were no longer mysterious embodiments of specificity, they were information – a code – that could be transmitted (another word from the electronic age), and the central hypothesis was that the code was composed of a series of letters – A, T, C and G.”
― Matthew Cobb, Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code

“DNA composition was constant in all tissues of a given species, but each species had its own profile.”
― Matthew Cobb, Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code

“By the end of the 1940s, support for the hypothesis that DNA had a fundamental role in heredity had grown much stronger.”
― Matthew Cobb, Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code

“By the end of the 1940s, it was widely known that the levels of protein in the transforming principle were effectively zero.”
― Matthew Cobb, Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code

“In the discussion, Gulland was asked about the possibility that a DNA molecule might be a helix, held together by the presence of evenly spaced hydrogen bonds between the bases.”
― Matthew Cobb, Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code

“Avery had described one of the most momentous discoveries in the history of science, and no one could think of anything to say.”
― Matthew Cobb, Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code

“Every result converged on the same conclusion: the transforming principle was composed of DNA. The discussion section of the article outlined the genetic context of their findings, using similar terms to their Rockefeller Institute report from earlier in the year: The inducing substance has been likened to a gene, and the capsular antigen which is produced in response to it has been regarded as a gene product.”
― Matthew Cobb, Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code

“the transforming principle could not be made of DNA because nucleic acids were all alike. As”
― Matthew Cobb, Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code

“Wiener and Rosenblueth showed that purposeful, goal-directed behaviour can be seen in organisms and machines, and that it operates through what is known as negative feedback.”
― Matthew Cobb, Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code