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Quote by Gordon B. Hinckley

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Standing for Something: 10 Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes

This book explores ten key virtues, offering insights and guidance on how to cultivate them in daily life to foster a healthier society and personal relationships. more

Author

Gordon B. Hinckley
Gordon B. Hinckley

Gordon B. Hinckley was a prominent religious leader known for his influential role in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He served as the 15th President of the Church from 1995 until his death in 2008. During his presidency, he was known for his dedication to spreading the church's message of peace and unity. more

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“Your cells are a country of ten thousand trillion citizens, each devoted in some intensively specific way to your overall well-being. There isn’t a thing they don’t do for you. They let you feel pleasure and form thoughts. They enable you to stand and stretch and caper. When you eat, they extract the nutrients, distribute the energy, and carry off the wastes - all those things you learned about in junior high school biology - but they also remember to make you hungry in the first place and reward you with a feeling of well-being afterward so that you won’t forget to eat again. They keep your hair growing, your ears waxed, your brain quietly purring. They manage every corner of your being. They will jump to your defence the instant you are threatened. They will unhesitatingly die for you - billions of them do so daily. And not once in all your years have you thanked even one of them.”

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“your atoms don't actually care about you - indeed, don't even know that you are there. They don't even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which would have ever been alive but all of which had once been you.)”

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“you and I having this conversation right now, and anyone reading the magazine, is part of an unbroken chain of communication – an interpretive process, with messages being exchanged millions of times per second, between cells and even organelles within cells, that stretches back, totally unbroken, 3.7 billion years. That’s 3.7 billion years of conversation going on between living structures in order to allow us to be here today. If there had ever been a break, even for a second, you wouldn’t be here. If you were looking for a metaphysical thought to give you a sense of overwhelming wonder, all you need is to meditate for a moment on the fact that you are part of this unbroken exchange, a conversation that goes all the way back to the puddle, or the clay-like substrate, that all life emerged from.”

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“To make things even more challenging, cells must also be able to make all of their component molecular machines using only the resources that are available in the local environment. Think of the magnitude of this accomplishment. Many bacteria are able to build all of their own molecules from the a few simple raw materials like carbon dioxide, oxygen, and ammonia. A single bacterial cell knows how to build several thousand types of proteins, including motors, girders, toxins, catalysts, and construction machinery. This cell also builds hundreds of RNA molecules with different orderings of nucleotides, as well as a diverse collection of lipids, sugar polymers, and a bewildering collection of exotic small molecules. All of these different molecules must be created from scratch, using only the molecules that the cell eats, drinks, and breathes.”

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“Endrocrine cells have neither dendrites nor axons, but many are like neurons in other ways. Some are electrically exitable: when pancreatic beta cells see an increase in extracellular glucose concentration they fire in bursts of spikes that are like the phasic bursts of vasopressin neurons; these bursts lead to calcium entry and trigger insulin secretion. In both neurons and endocrine cells, peptides are packages in vesicles just as neurotransmitters are. Typically, peptide secretion is the result of the same process as that by which neurotransmitters are released: exocytosis is triggered in both cases by an increase in intracellular calcium. In neurons, this happens when spikes depolarize the neuron, opening voltage-sensitive calcium channels, and the same occurs in spiking endocrine cells. However, endocrine cells have another trick. Th cell bodies of all eukaryotic cells contain rough endoplasmic reticulum, which sequesters free calcium, and activation of receptors for some neurotransmitters or hormones can release calcium from these stores. In many endocrine cells, this 'calcium mobilization' can trigger exocytosis of vesicles without any involvement of spikes. There is no rough endoplasmic reticulum in axon terminals, so spikes are necessarily involved in the release of synaptic vesicles.”

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“The MWC equilibrium framework not only has been exploited for thinking about the activity of the chemotaxis receptors but also has served as a null model for the switching behavior of the bacterial flagellar motor. This motor switches between clockwise and counterclockwise rotation, as a result of the binding of CheY-P to the FliM part of the motor. The distribution of duration times in the counterclockwise rotation state of the motor appears to defy description in terms of the MWC model and Ising-type conformational spread model, instead demanding that the system operate out of equilibrium with constant energy dissipation. The emergence of such nonequilibrium effects where the MWC framework breaks down represents one of the most exciting frontiers for thinking about the function of allosteric molecules in the context of living cells.”

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