Aaron Ciechanover Quotes

It's so hard to figure out what's going on in biological systems. You just can't see them.

I see myself as a scientist who is interested in what's going on inside of us.

In research, I wanted to establish the medicinal chemistry/bioassay conjugation as an academic pursuit, as exciting to the imagination as astrophysics or molecular biology.

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

Medicine is no longer looking at organs. It looks at the processes inside the cell.

I have a Ph.D. in cell biology. And that's really manual labor. I mean, experimental science, you do it with your hands. So it's very different. You're out there in a lab, cleaning test tubes, and it just wasn't that fascinating.

I set up a laboratory in the Department of Physiology in the Medical School in South Africa and begin to try to find a bacteriophage system which we might use to solve the genetic code.

Perhaps the most useful lesson which has come out of the work on penicillin has been the demonstration that success in this field depends on the development and coordinated use of technical methods.

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

Drug discovery is terribly expensive, just to find out how one drug could or could not work and all its side effects.

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.

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.

Molecular chirality plays a key role in science and technology. In particular, life depends on molecular chirality in that many biological functions are inherently dissymmetric.

The United States has an active pharmaceutical industry that has brought huge benefits to the U.S. public. Most Americans, who benefit from these advances, have little understanding of how difficult it is to create an important new medical therapy and make it available to improve public health.

All I ever promised was that I was sure I could develop a new pharmacological agent which might answer a physiological question. Any utility would be implicit in that answer.

If we can actually decrease the failure rate from nine out of 10 drugs failing in clinical trials and instead have seven out of 10 instead failing, that is a major victory for drug discovery and for people having better therapy.

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.

Biology is the most powerful technology ever created. DNA is software, protein are hardware, cells are factories.

To start with, pharma was an industry based on innovation, drug discovery.

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

I had seen a Pfizer's pilot plant in 1965 and decided that, 'I'll build a Pfizer.' If not Pfizer, I have built Dr Reddy's, which is no less respectable.

We see chemistry, how the atoms are arranged in the molecules, how the disease changes the arrangement. Perhaps we will find which drug disentangles the aggregates that make a brain senile. Many of us are interested in such things.

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.

I can't comment on the internal decision-making at other companies, but RVT-101 has the potential to be a very valuable product in the treatment of Alzheimer's, which is a huge unmet medical need.

Being a biochemist, I did a lot of tissue-culture research prior to working at NASA and when I first started working there.