Cesar Milstein Quotes

During my early years at Minnesota I conducted an evening enzyme seminar.

I began studying ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow in Peter Moore's laboratory in 1978.

I began my thesis research at Harvard by working with a team in the laboratory of William N. Lipscomb, a Nobel chemistry Laureate, in 1976, on the structure of carboxypeptidase A. I did postdoctoral studies with David Blow at the MRC lab of Molecular Biology in Cambridge studying chymotrypsin.

The study of the amino acid sequence around the disulphide bonds of the immunoglobulins was my own short-cut to the understanding of antibody diversity.

Back in 1962, when I had by accident become the supervisor of Roberto Celis in Argentina, it occurred to me that antibody diversity might arise from the joining by disulphide bridges of a variety of small polypeptides in combinatorial patterns.

I chose biochemistry as my major and graduated after 4 years with an Honours degree in Biochemistry. During that time, I had come to love biochemistry research, although I was just getting my feet wet in laboratory research.

Fred Sanger was one of the most important scientists of the 20th century.

To develop drugs for people, we basically dismantle the system. In the lab, we look at things the size of a cell or two. We dismantle life into very small models.

The success in the determination of the high-resolution structures of ribosomal subunits and eventually the whole ribosome was the culmination of decades of effort.

Few scientists acquainted with the chemistry of biological systems at the molecular level can avoid being inspired.

I was first exposed to the idea of macro-molecular sequences while I was a postdoctoral fellow with Jack Strominger at Harvard. During that time, I briefly visited Fred Sanger's laboratory in Cambridge, England, to learn the methodology of RNA fingerprinting and sequencing.

This work made me more and more interested in biological matter, and I decided that I really wanted to work on the X-ray analysis of biological molecules.

It was Max Perutz who inspired me to go into structural biology when he gave a lecture at Harvard in 1963. As soon as I heard him talk, I decided that this is what I want to do.

When I started engineering proteins I didn't know how hard it would be.

Enzymes are masters of chemistry. They evolved over billions of years to perform specific biological functions. They make complex materials with virtually no waste.

Molecular biology is essentially the practice of biochemistry without a license.

Think about the whole world of biological complex sciences. We still don't understand the way a protein folds the way it does.

It was an extremely trying time for me. Best was still intimate with MacLeod and the others about the laboratory. I was out of the picture entirely. MacLeod had taken over the whole physiological investigation. Collip had taken over the biochemistry. Professor Graham and Dr. Campbell had taken over the whole clinical aspect of the investigation.

I have a biology degree, okay?

At the National Institute for Medical Research, I came into contact with biological scientists and formed collaborative projects with several of them. In particular, George Popjak and I shared an interest in cholesterol.

I want to know diverse facts about such things as galaxies or molecules or proteins or insect species. I have an impulse to want to know the little details, which are usually of no significance to non-specialists. I own a dissection microscope, and if there is an insect in the house, I sometimes catch it and look at it under the microscope.

In 2008, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for work done on a molecule called green fluorescent protein that was isolated from the bioluminescent chemistry of a jellyfish, and it's been equated to the invention of the microscope in terms of the impact that it has had on cell biology and genetic engineering.

I've always been interested in science - one of my favourite books is James Watson's 'Molecular Biology of the Gene.'

My undergraduate, I double-majored in biology and chemistry. Biology was kind of my love.

Biochemical interactions are very interesting to me.