Peter Agre Quotes

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

Until 1985, when my lab found the protein they are made of, aquaporins hadn't yet been identified. There had been a controversy in biology for more than 100 years about how water moved through cells.

For me, the discovery of aquaporins was like a gift after 25 years in basic science.

There are over 7,000 different types of proteins in typical eukaryotic cells; the total number depends on the cell class and function.

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

A living cell requires energy not only for all its functions, but also for the maintenance of its structure.

Every cell in your body contains the same genetic information.

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.

I try to think up material that might apply to the subjects they are studying. How many mitochondria does it take to power a cell? One. Because mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. Not ready for prime time, that one.

Protein synthesis is a central problem for the whole of biology, and that it is in all probability closely related to gene action.

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

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

Proteins are the machinery of living tissue that builds the structures and carries out the chemical reactions necessary for life.

The living cell almost always contains, locked in its interior, the visible or invisible products of its physiological activity or its nourishment.

At the end of the 1970s, I was a young researcher at the Weizmann Institute with an ambitious plan to shed light on one of the major outstanding questions concerning living cells: the process of protein biosynthesis.

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.

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

The concentration of the ferment iron in living substance is very small, being in the region of 1 g to 10 million g of cellular substance.

If you wanted to dissect the structure of living cells, genetic analysis was an extremely powerful method, so my interest turned to that.

In 1936, when I was born in the small Silesian village of Waltersdorf in the county of Sprottau in the then-eastern part of Germany, now part of Poland, the fine structure of the cell was still an enigma.

The cell is a city of production centres, each part working away like mad, and it's co-ordinated. Six trillion cells in a body - you can't help but be moved.

We finally understand in general terms how a cell is organized, how its specialized organs function in a well integrated manner to insure its survival and replication.

Small bodies, about half a micron in diameter, and later referred to under the name of 'mitochondria' were detected under the light microscope as early as 1894.

We are seeing the cells of plants and animals more and more clearly as chemical factories, where the various products are manufactured in separate workshops.

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