Christian de Duve Quotes

The properties which differentiate living matter from any kind of inorganic imitation may be instinctively felt, but can hardly be formulated without expert knowledge.

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

When we think of what is necessary for the phenomenon that we call life, we think of compartmentalization, keeping the molecules which are important for life in a membrane, isolated from the rest of the environment, but yet, in an environment in which they actually could originate together.

A living thing is distinguished from a dead thing by the multiplicity of the changes at any moment taking place in it.

I think you can say that life is a system in which proteins and nucleic acids interact in ways that allow the structure to grow and reproduce. It's that growth and reproduction, the ability to make more of yourself, that's important.

Biochemistry is the science of life. All our life processes - walking, talking, moving, feeding - are essentially chemical reactions. So biochemistry is actually the chemistry of life, and it's supremely interesting.

Every seed is awakened, and all animal life.

If you go back to the first single-cell form of life, it clearly possessed the capacity to receive, to utilize, to store, to transform, and to transmit information.

Biology

The cell, over the billions of years of her life, has covered the earth many times with her substance, found ways to control herself and her environment, and insure her survival.

Think about a seed. Once it lands, it's stuck. It can't move to find better soil, moisture or sunlight. It's able to create every part of itself to grow and reproduce with the help of air, water and sun.

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

Of course, one way of thinking about all of life and civilization is as being about how the world registers and processes information. Certainly that's what sex is about; that's what history is about.

First, Darwinian theory tells us how a certain amount of diversity in life forms can develop once we have various types of complex living organisms already in existence.

Life is a force in its own right. It is a new element. And it has altered the Earth. It covers Earth like a skin.

The human body is essentially something other than an animal organism.

The problem that we, as living organisms, face - and not we only, humans, but any living organism faces - is the management of life.

Basically, the intersection between the animal world and the plant world is where life regenerates itself over and over, billions of times each day. It's the foundation of life on our planet.

There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.

Biology is far from understanding exactly how a single cell develops into a baby, but research suggests that human development can ultimately be explained in terms of biochemistry and molecular biology. Most scientists would make a similar statement about evolution.

Biology, meaning the science of all life, is a late notion.

The internal machinery of life, the chemistry of the parts, is something beautiful. And it turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life.

I would be the worst biologist in the world!

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

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.