Arthur Kornberg

“Without advances, medicine regresses and reverts to witchcraft.”

“DNA, like a tape recording, carries a message in which there are specific instructions for a job to be done.”

“According to physical measurements, DNA chains are, on the average, 10,000 units long.”

“As in biomedical science, pioneering industrial inventions have not been mothered by necessity. Rather, inventions for which there was no commercial use only later became the commercial airplanes, xerography and lasers on which modern society depends.”

“No matter how counter-intuitive it may seem, basic research has proven over and over to be the lifeline of practical advances in medicine.”

“I told my three sons stories about germs more than fifty years ago as fanciful bedtime tales.”

“I feel now, as we did then, that for an effective approach to the problem of nucleic acid biosynthesis, it was essential to understand the biosynthesis of the simple nucleotides and the coenzymes and to have these concepts and methodology well in hand.”

“The pursuit of curiosity about the basic facts of nature has proven, with few exceptions throughout the history of medical science, to be the route by which the successful drugs and devices of modern medicine were discovered.”

“Analysis of the composition of samples of DNA from a great variety of sources and by many investigators revealed the remarkable fact that the purine content always equals the pyrimidine content.”