Eric Betzig Quotes

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

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.

There is something I feel when I animate something; you can never really understand the character you're animating unless you've had the opportunity to turn it around. Once you've done that, you know it is a three-dimensional object.

I wish I could do everything in 3D.

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

Mapping and visualization is a huge area of work and is of interest to many people. We're working on reinventing a new kind of 3D cartography to make it easier to tell stories with 3D maps.

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

I'm very interested in 3D.

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.

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.

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.

In the early 1950s, during the near avalanche of discoveries, rediscoveries, and redefinitions of subcellular components made possible by electron microscopy, those prospecting in this newly opened field were faced with the problem of what to do with their newly acquired wealth.

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

You'd need a very specialized electron microscope to get down to the level to actually see a single strand of DNA.

Telescopes and microscopes bring to our view the otherwise unseen and unknown.

I'm a big 3-D convert.

True 3D is, you have to kind of originate the images in three dimensions.

A cell is a complex structure, with its investing membrane, nucleus, and nucleolus.

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'.

In essence, we're imaging the same cell for anywhere from forty to a hundred thousand times to create one of the movies that we see.

There's always something that an engineer can do to make microscopes better.

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.

When a sketch comes into this three-dimensional form and everybody contributes, it's really fantastic.

I've always been very interested in the question of how computation can fundamentally advance the things that we can see. This led me to have a fascination with medical imaging, especially things like MRI and scanning, and eventually computer graphics.