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Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. There is nothing dead in Nature. Everything is organic and living, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living organism.

The way life manages information involves a logical structure that differs fundamentally from mere complex chemistry. Therefore chemistry alone will not explain life's origin, any more than a study of silicon, copper and plastic will explain how a computer can execute a program.

I consider nature a vast chemical laboratory in which all kinds of composition and decompositions are formed.

As soon as we can wrest from Nature the secret of the internal structure of the compounds produced by her, chemical science can then even surpass Nature by producing compounds as variations of the natural ones, which the living cell is unable to construct.

Our cells engage in protein production, and many of those proteins are enzymes responsible for the chemistry of life.

Life is a process of evolution.

If you look at the ecological circuitry of this planet, the ways in which materials like carbon or sulfur or phosphorous or nitrogen get cycled in ways that makes them available for our biology, the organisms that do the heavy lifting are bacteria.

For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.

It has been recognized since the dawn of microbiology that the soil is inhabited by a living microscopic population which is responsible for the numerous reactions that take place in the soil and that affect the life and economy of man in many ways.