Gunter Blobel Quotes

Trying to understand fundamental processes that take place as organisms develop and how their various cells interact with one another - one can see what happens with those cells by asking questions about the fundamentals of biology.

My introduction to cell cycle control was provided by a clear, scholarly and beautiful seminar given by John Gerhart one afternoon in the summer of 1979.

I became aware of the very complex internal organization in a cell from the basic science classes, and it made me think about how all that could work. It seemed like a great mystery, especially how organelles in the cell can be arranged in three dimensions, and how thousands of proteins could find their way to the right location in the cells.

In basic research, the use of the electron microscope has revealed to us the complex universe of the cell, the basic unit of life.

Therefore, I reasoned that study of the cell cycle responsible for the reproduction of cells was important and might even be illuminating about the nature of life.

This particular nurse said, Cancer cells are those which have forgotten how to die. I was so struck by this statement.

Cell culture is a little like gardening. You sit and you look at cells, and then you see something and say, 'You know, that doesn't look right'.

The importance of the egg's non-nuclear material - the cytoplasm - in early development is apparent in the consistent relation that is seen to exist between certain regions in the cytoplasm of a fertilized egg and certain kinds or directions of cell differentiation.

I am interested in how cells know what they are and how they should behave in their proper place in the body.

In reality, a cell is a biological mini-me compared to the human body. A cell has every biological system that you have.

The knowledge we have of communication among cells does not permit my giving you a sophisticated understanding.

A cell is regarded as the true biological atom.

Nuclear transplantation is a technique that has enormously facilitated the analysis of these interactions between nucleus and cytoplasm.

There's always a great deal of business to be transacted in one's office. There are always visitors it seems to me, an unending stream of them, who come with letters of recommendation, or come actually on substantive business.

I was driven completely by a desire to understand how cells worked.

As long as we do not know how the cell works, we don't know the kind of havoc the AIDS virus creates in the cell.

I think it's wonderful when a love story begins with a great deal of romance and affection, passion and excitement, that's how it should be. But I don't necessarily know that it's the wisest thing in the world to expect that it ends there, or that it should, 30 years down the road, still look as it did on the night of your first kiss.

My main efforts focussed on trying to identify the rate controlling steps during the cell cycle. Crucial for this analysis were wee mutants that were advanced prematurely through the cell cycle and so divided at a reduced cell size.

We know specific genes are turned on in specific cells, but we don't know to what extent this happens.

Life needs a membrane to contain itself so it can replicate and mutate.

One of the first papers I wrote at the University of Wisconsin, in 1977, was on stem cells. I realized that if I changed the environment that these cells were in, I could turn the cells into bone, and if I changed the environment a bit more, they would form fat cells.

We know that our cells are speaking to each other.

Life is the division of human cells, a process which begins at conception.

President Ford used humor a great deal.

I have spent a great deal of my life being part of minorities. Some of the people I admire the most in the world have had the courage to defend, against wind and tide, minority viewpoints in those frightening times when any disagreement with universal conformity is identified as treason.