John Tyler Bonner Quotes

#1. As in all of biology, comparative studies showing differences among species are often helpful for a better understanding of the basic mechanisms; with all its advantages, there is a danger of clinging exclusively to one model organism.

John Tyler Bonner

#2. My prime interests are in evolution and development. I use the cellular slime molds as a tool to seek an understanding of those twin disciplines.

John Tyler Bonner

#3. Any object, whether animate or inanimate, will have a size. Airplanes, boats, or musical string instruments vary in size just like animals and plants, and in all cases, their size and their material construction are totally different matters even though they affect one another.

John Tyler Bonner

#4. The sudden appearance of mushrooms after a summer rain is one of the more impressive spectacles of the plant world.

John Tyler Bonner

#5. Evolution, cell biology, biochemistry, and developmental biology have made extraordinary progress in the last hundred years - much of it since I was weaned on schoolboy biology in the 1930s. Most striking of all is the sudden eruption of molecular biology starting in the 1950s.

John Tyler Bonner

#6. It is hard to explain the huge variety of diatoms - a microorganism that has 100,000 species - in terms of natural selection.

John Tyler Bonner

#7. In the seventeenth century, it was held by some that inside a human sperm there was a minute human being - a homunculus - that was planted inside the womb. Development consisted of the miniature homunculus enlarging and passing through birth and on to maturity-just like inflating a balloon.

John Tyler Bonner

#8. When, as an undergraduate, I began experiments on these slime molds in 1940, only one other person, Kenneth Raper, was working on them at that time. In fact, he discovered the model species Dictyostelium discoideum, which is the species used in the majority of the experimental work today.

John Tyler Bonner