"Today I want to talk about biochemistry. We are going to spend the next three lectures on biochemistry. This is the chemistry of living organisms. And I want to make several points by way of introduction.

The first one is that living organisms are chemical systems. And they are governed by the same laws that apply to inanimate matter. We don't have a special chemistry. And, in fact, I came across this comment that was made by the Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman who said that if in some cataclysm all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed and only one sentence passed onto the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? "I believe that it is the atomic hypothesis or the atomic fact or whatever you wish to call it, that all things are made of atoms..."