It is one of the more striking generalizations of biochemistry - which surprisingly is hardly ever mentioned in the biochemical textbooks - that the twenty amino acids and the four bases, are, with minor reservations, the same throughout Nature. Francis Crick
[The smallest bacterium] is so much more like people than Stanley Miller's mixtures of chemicals, because it already has these system properties. So to go from a bacterium to people is less of a step than to go from a mixture of amino acids to that bacterium. Lynn Margulis
Nobody had made the same full use of the properties of acids and metal in this way before. Having drown on the copper-plate and left areas of it bare, I laid it in the bath of acid and achieved effects that astonished even me, full of subtle nuances. Emil Nolde
The basic structure of proteins is quite simple: they are formed by hooking together in a chain discrete subunits called amino acids. Michael Behe
In this atmosphere I soon became interested in nucleic acids. Frederick Sanger
Sharp acids corrode their own containers. Albanian Proverb