Nature's stern discipline enjoins mutual help at least as often as warfare. The fittest may also be the gentlest.

From a biology point of view, the purpose of humanity is to ensure his survival by expanding his domain into the stars.

Reply when questioned on the safety of the polio vaccine he developed:It is safe, and you can't get safer than safe.

I furnished the body that was needed to sit in the defendant's chair.[Explaining his role in the Scopes Monkey Trial.]

The life sciences contain spiritual values which can never be explained by the materialistic attitude of present day science

We are not victims of our genes, but masters of our fates, able to create lives overflowing with peace, happiness, and love.

The cause of nutrition and growth resides not in the organism as a whole but in the separate elementary parts—the cells.

Darwin abolished special creations, contributed the Origin of Species and hitched all life together in one unbroken procession.

Are we biology or God or something higher? I know my heart beats and I listen to it. The beat is biology, but what is the song?

I think it's reasonable to suppose that one could oscillate between being biologically 20 and biologically 25 indefinitely.

The more closely two organisms depend upon each other the harder it becomes to tell where one organism ends and the other begins.

All of today's DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of [the] first molecule.

Threats to our standing in the eyes of others are remarkably potent biologically, almost as powerful as those to our very survival.

Imagine a house coming together spontaneously from all the information contained in the bricks: that is how animal bodies are made.

We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.