Stefan Hell Quotes

What does that suggest when a compound this simple plays such an important role? To me it suggests that nitric oxide is one of the most primitive elements of cellular signaling, that it goes way back into evolution.

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.

Mammalian cells of all types disgorge prostaglandins at the slightest provocation, but the tissue content of prostaglandins is very low compared with the release.

I am not surprised that other gases may participate in cellular signaling and regulation. Our early work with nitric oxide was just the beginning. I'm sure more will be discovered.

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.

We may say that a basic substance is one which has a lone pair of electrons which may be used to complete the stable group of another atom, and that an acid is one which can employ a lone pair from another molecule in completing the stable group of one of its own atoms.

Eventually I realised there must be a way by playing with the molecules; trying to turn the molecules on and off allows you to see adjacent things you couldn't see before.

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.

Most of the people who claim to be doing systems biology are really studying simple and complex molecular machines and how they function, and that is an aspect of systems biology; but it isn't. It's the networks that really capture and store and transmit and integrate and modulate and finally end up executing the biological information as it is.

The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment.

There's nothing colder than chemistry.

We have found that fusions of GFP with the RING finger domains of certain E3 ubiquitin ligases creates an unstable GFP. We have used unstable GFP to learn how disruption of microtubules in the touch receptor neurons causes a generalized reduction in protein levels in the cells.

The more we understand what happens in living cells, the more incredibly powerful you realize things can be when they work from the bottom up, by interaction of one molecule and another.

Cancer cells come pre-programmed to execute a well-defined cascade of changes, seemingly designed to facilitate both their enhanced survival and their dissemination through the bloodstream. There is even an air of conspiracy in the way that tumours use chemical signals to create cancer-friendly niches in remote organs.

Although we often discussed the idea of research on the nature of antigen recognition by T cells in the laboratory in the late Seventies while I was still in Basel, the real work did not start until the early Eighties in my new laboratory at M.I.T.

Molecules A and B meet, marry, and beget the species. This takes place in one-millionth of a billionth of a second. This is a fundamental process in nature, and the world was looking for a way to be able to see the process. But many brilliant people said it couldn't be done.

It's nice to be able to look at one protein, but life is driven by the interactions between proteins, so it's really essential to be able to see multiple proteins at a time to understand these interactions.

Every chemical reaction has a transition state.

A key issue in developmental biology at that time was the problem of how cells underwent differentiation, with most workers concentrating on explanations in terms of changes in enzyme and gene regulation.

A great deal has been learned about cell communication. The universal nature of cellular structure and organization in bacteria, plant and animal cells has been discovered.

I think there's a little bit of sizzling here. Honestly, I can feel it. The ions are flying back and forth.

I have lived much of my life among molecules. They are good company.

There are very few things in the body that nitric oxide doesn't regulate.

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.