• Science
    Quotes
  • What's
    New
  • Science
    Stories
  • Chemistry
    Stories
  • Perpetual
    Motion
  • Newsletter
    Sign-up
  • Search
    search icon
  • Feedback
    email icon
  • Home
  • Text Menu
  • Science Store
  • News
  • Wall Calendar
  • Survey
  • Privacy
  • Terms of Use
TODAYINSCI ®

Find science on your birthday
TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY
Follow @todayinsci
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index F > Category: Fertilization

Fertilization Quotes (9 quotes)

At fertilization, these two 'haploid' nuclei are added together to make a 'diploid' nucleus that now contains 2a, 2b and so on; and, by the splitting of each chromosome and the regulated karyokinetic separation of the daughter chromosomes, this double series is inherited by both of the primary blastomeres. In the resulting resting nuclei the individual chromosomes are apparently destroyed. But we have the strongest of indications that, in the stroma of the resting nucleus, every one of the chromosomes that enters the nucleus survives as a well-defined region; and as the cell prepares for its next division this region again gives rise to the same chromosome (Theory of the Individuality of the Chromosomes). In this way the two sets of chromosomes brought together at fertilization are inherited by all the cells of the new individual. It is only in the germinal cells that the so called reduction division converts the double series into a single one. Out of the diploid state, the haploid is once again generated.
— Theodor Boveri
Arch. Zellforsch, 1909, 3, 181, trans. Henry Harris, The Birth of the Cell (1999), 171-2.
Science quotes on:  |  Cell (74)  |  Chromosome (13)

Every complete set of chromosomes contains the full code; so there are, as a rule, two copies of the latter in the fertilized egg cell, which forms the earliest stage of the future individual. In calling the structure of the chromosome fibres a code-script we mean that the all-penetrating mind, once conceived by Laplace, to which every causal connection lay immediately open, could tell from their structure whether the egg would develop, under suitable conditions, into a black cock or into a speckled hen, into a fly or a maize plant, a rhododendron, a beetle, a mouse or a woman. To which we may add, that the appearances of the egg cells are very often remarkably similar; and even when they are not, as in the case of the comparatively gigantic eggs of birds and reptiles, the difference is not so much in the relevant structures as in the nutritive material which in these cases is added for obvious reasons.
But the term code-script is, of course, too narrow. The chromosome structures are at the same time instrumental in bringing about the development they foreshadow. They are law-code and executive power?or, to use another simile, they are architect's plan and builder's craft-in one.
— Erwin Schrödinger
What is Life? (1944), 21-2.
Science quotes on:  |  Appearance (39)  |  Architect (4)  |  Beetle (5)  |  Bird (43)  |  Builder (3)  |  Cause (101)  |  Cell (74)  |  Chromosome (13)  |  Cock (2)  |  Code (7)  |  Copy (5)  |  Development (97)  |  Egg (23)  |  Executive (2)  |  Fly (19)  |  Foreshadow (2)  |  Hen (2)  |  Individual (45)  |  Pierre-Simon Laplace (45)  |  Mouse (14)  |  Narrow (8)  |  Plan (32)  |  Plant (84)  |  Reptile (12)  |  Similarity (14)  |  Simile (3)  |  Structure (84)  |  Structure (84)  |  Woman (28)

Everyone admits that the male is the primary efficient cause in generation, as being that in whom the species or form resides, and they further assert that his genitures emitted in coitus causes the egg both to exist and to be fertile. But how the semen of the cock produces the chick from the egg, neither the philosophers nor the physicians of yesterday or today have satisfactorily explained, or solved the problem formulated by Aristotle.
— William Harvey
Disputations Touching the Generation of Animals (1651), trans. Gweneth Whitteridge (1981), Chapter 47, 214.
Science quotes on:  |  Aristotle (96)  |  Egg (23)  |  Reproduction (30)

I am just laboring in the vineyard. I am at the operating table, and I make my rounds. I believe there is a cross-fertilization between writing and surgery. If I withdraw from surgery, I would not have another word to write. Having become a writer makes me a better doctor.
[Reply to reporter's question whether he would rather be a full-time writer instead of a surgeon.]
— Richard Saul Selzer
Quoted in Thomas Lask, 'Publishing:Surgeon and Incisive Writer', New York Times (28 Sep 1979), C24.
Science quotes on:  |  Better (28)  |  Doctor (49)  |  Surgery (27)  |  Writing (43)

In a University we are especially bound to recognise not only the unity of science itself, but the communion of the workers in science. We are too apt to suppose that we are congregated here merely to be within reach of certain appliances of study, such as museums and laboratories, libraries and lecturers, so that each of us may study what he prefers. I suppose that when the bees crowd round the flowers it is for the sake of the honey that they do so, never thinking that it is the dust which they are carrying from flower to flower which is to render possible a more splendid array of flowers, and a busier crowd of bees, in the years to come. We cannot, therefore, do better than improve the shining hour in helping forward the cross-fertilization of the sciences.
— James Clerk Maxwell
'The Telephone', Nature, 15, 1878. In W. D. Niven (ed.), The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell (1890), Vol. 2, 743-4.
Science quotes on:  |  Bee (9)  |  Congregation (2)  |  Dust (16)  |  Flower (18)  |  Honey (3)  |  Laboratory (66)  |  Lecturer (3)  |  Library (20)  |  Men Of Science (88)  |  Museum (12)  |  Recognition (28)  |  Science (754)  |  Study (117)  |  Suppose (8)  |  Unity (14)  |  University (22)  |  Worker (8)

Nature appears not to have intended that any flower should be fertilized by its own pollen.
— Christian Konrad Sprengel
Das entdeckte Geheimniss der Natur im Bau und in der Befructung der Blumen (1793), 43. Quoted in Lawrence J. King, 'Christian Konrad Sprengel', in C. C. Gillispie (ed.), Dictionary of Scientific Biography (1975), Vol. 12, 588.
Science quotes on:  |  Flower (18)  |  Intention (15)  |  Nature (475)  |  Pollen (2)

The reduced variability of small populations is not always due to accidental gene loss, but sometimes to the fact that the entire population was started by a single pair or by a single fertilized female. These 'founders' of the population carried with them only a very small proportion of the variability of the parent population. This 'founder' principle sometimes explains even the uniformity of rather large populations, particularly if they are well isolated and near the borders of the range of the species.
— Ernst Mayr
Systematics and the Origin of Species: From the Viewpoint of a Zoologist (1942), 237.
Science quotes on:  |  Accident (24)  |  Female (8)  |  Founder (8)  |  Gene (47)  |  Isolation (16)  |  Parent (15)  |  Population (34)  |  Principle (87)  |  Range (10)  |  Uniform (5)  |  Variation (30)

The uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled. It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is a family resemblance.
— Lewis Thomas
The Lives of a Cell (1974), 5.
Science quotes on:  |  Cell (74)  |  Diversity (29)  |  Enzyme (11)  |  Family (11)  |  Gene (47)  |  Grass (5)  |  Lightning (14)  |  Look (25)  |  Origin Of Life (11)  |  Parent (15)  |  Progeny (4)  |  Resemblance (14)  |  Sharing (6)  |  Whale (9)

This constitution we designate by the word genotype. The word is entirely independent of any hypothesis; it is fact, not hypothesis that different zygotes arising by fertilisation can thereby have different qualities, that, even under quite similar conditions of life, phenotypically diverse individuals can develop.
— Wilhelm Ludvig Johannsen
Elemente der Exakten Erblichkeitslehre (1909), 165-70. Trans. in Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution and Inheritance (1982), 782.
Science quotes on:  |  Diversity (29)  |  Genotype (3)  |  Life (379)  |  Nomenclature (93)  |  Zygote (2)



Carl Sagan Thumbnail At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. -- Carl Sagan

More quotes:     Name Index    Isaac Newton    Lord Kelvin    Charles Darwin    Albert Einstein    Aristotle    Michio Kaku    Srinivasa Ramanujan    Carl Sagan    Florence Nightingale    Atomic  Bomb    Biology    Chemistry    Deforestation    Engineering

Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Custom Quotations Search - custom search within only our quotations pages:


Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |



Please add a link from your own site or blog if you find this site useful.
Author Icon by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing the site with Tweets, Facebook and Stumble Upon.






Explore 100 Famous Scientist Quotes Pages

Click above to expand
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton

Scroll above for more
Scientist Quotes Index
Today in Science History ©  1999 - 2013 by Todayinsci ®