Bio99 - Quotes and Candids

Top Ten Lists

Faculty Quotes

Surveys

Recently Overheard Faculty Quotes:

7.60 Cell Biology

Rick Young: "Wait. Remember, I was up late last night. You're going too fast."
in response to a student's question.

Rick Young: "Why are the proteins called chaperones? It might be the same reason why when you were younger you had a chaperone."
Student: "Degradation?"
the quick on the draw student was first year Matt Rhoades.

Rick Young: "If you get the impression that Steve and I are jealous ..."
Steve Bell: "WRONG. We could do this any day if we wanted to."
speaking about a Kim Nasmyth paper. this one might make more sense after 7.50

Steve Bell: "Bringing us to the old adage of biology - 'Negative results suck' "

Steve Bell: "...it mucks about with nucleosomes. It's not quite clear what the molecular meaning of the word 'muck' is in this case."
refering to the Swi/Snf chromatin remodeling factors

Rick Young: "Wait, you can't sit behind me. I get nervous when people sit behind me."

Rick Young: "How would you escape from arrest induced by a peptide."

Steve Bell: "You can't keep your graduate students for 16 years. Even at Harvard."

Rick Young: "For those of us who are more monosylabic ..."

Rick Young: "What I call the human people will not come to that agreement."
speaking about nomenclature

Steve Bell: "It's sort of the ugly step sister of the central dogma."
RNA translation into protein

Steve Bell: "I've always wondered who the guy was who had death cap [mushrooms] in his lab and decided to grind them up and add them to his transcription assay."

Steve Bell: "It turns out proteins have other issues."

Steve Bell: "It's a way of keeping the rif-raf out of cells."

7.70 Gene Expression

Gerry Fink: "There's a lot I'm not telling you here just to save you nightmares."

Gerry Fink: "What do pigs chase after? Truffles. Truffles are ascomycetes."

Gerry Fink: "You are biologists, right? Not physicists."

Gerry Fink: "Maybe God decided they will be perpetually preadolescent."
speaking about fungi that have no known sexual cycle

Gerry Fink: "Chromatin structure is like 'beast'."

Gerry Fink: "History is much easier through the retrospectiscope."

Gerry Fink: "It's red you can see across the block."
describing the advantages of using ade1 as a reporter gene in yeast

Gerry Fink: "I didn't make the universe."
clearing up that long held misconception ...

Gerry Fink: "It would be bad news if every time you turned around you turned into a mutant."

Gerry Fink: "Why cows? Why not lettuce?"
pondering the origin of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy

Gerry Fink: "Either you had to be a genius or a farmer to find out what was going on."
the early days of plant biology

Gerry Fink: "You have to think about it like a Whitehead faculty member. Corn is as big as a graduate student."

Gerry Fink: "The truth about bacteria with F plasmids is that they'll do it with anything."

Gerry Fink: "It's a zoo. It's called somaclonal variation which sounds like fun, but isn't."

Gerry Fink: "[We thought we'd] have the plants make more tryptophan and make the world a happier place to be in."

Gerry Fink: "It didn't work, which was very discouraging for saviour of the world ... and for the postdoc involved too."
referring to the above

Gerry Fink: "Tobacco is about half a graduate student."

Gerry Fink: "When you transform plants the DNA goes willy-nilly into the genome."

7.97 Evolution

Student: "So individual selection and kin selection might be to genic selection as biology is to chemistry, right?"
Carl Pabo: "It's been a long time since I took my SATs ..."
editor's note: no, it's not. and yes, the student was from the chemistry department

Carl Pabo: "So if we move away from sex for a few minutes."

Carl Pabo: "So when you have a bunch of young guys skateboarding around the courtyard that's a process of mating display."

Carl Pabo: "I'd be a millionaire. There'd be opportunities to marry and everything."
speaking about the advantages of the 'defect' strategy in the prisoner's dilema.

Department Colloquium

David Skuse: "It's jolly good if you're looking at the Y chromosome."
he's British and reminded me a lot of John Cleese.

David Skuse: "Females are superior in some respects and indeed there is some objective evidence to back this up."

David Skuse: "You'll never beat us at darts."
speaking, of course, about women.

Steve Elledge: "Humans are a good model organism for studying yeast."

Last Updated February, 2000. Bio99@MIT