Joshua Lederberg Quotes

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

I knew the lysosomes and peroxisomes because I had discovered them; I knew the mitochondria because I was interested in them. I knew the membrane system because my friend, George Palade, had worked on that.

I remember vividly my student days, spending hours at the light microscope, turning endlessly the micrometric screw, and gazing at the blurred boundary which concealed the mysterious ground substance where the secret mechanisms of cell life might be found.

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

Physiology has spawned many biological sciences, amongst them my own field of pharmacology.

We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology.

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

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.

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

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.

Studying organisms at a molecular level was totally compelling because it was moving from being a naturalist, which was the 19th-century kind of science, to being very focused and really getting to the heart of these molecules.

When, in 1949, I decided to join the little band of early explorers who had followed Albert Claude in his pioneering expeditions, electron microscopy was still in its infancy.

Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas.

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

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.

Evolution, cell biology, biochemistry, and developmental biology have made extraordinary progress in the last hundred years - much of it since I was weaned on schoolboy biology in the 1930s. Most striking of all is the sudden eruption of molecular biology starting in the 1950s.

As soon as we touch the complex processes that go on in a living thing, be it plant or animal, we are at once forced to use the methods of this science [Chemistry / Physics]. No longer will the microscope, the kymograph, the scalpel avail for the complete solution of the problem…. the investigator must associate himself with those who have labored in fields where molecules and atoms, rather than multicellular tissues or even unicellular organisms, are the units of study.

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.

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

Until 1930 or thereabout biologists [using microscopes], in the situation of Astronomers and Astrophysicists, were permitted to see the objects of their interest, but not to touch them; the cell was as distant from us, as the stars and galaxies were from them.

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

In my second year, after moving to the Medical School, I began the courses of Anatomy and Physiology. I had begun to see that I was interested in cells and their functions.

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

There's so much I'm interested in that I didn't discover in high school. For 'The Amazing Spider-Man', because Gwen is a scientist, we went to a lab in San Diego, and we were learning about biology. And I'm fascinated! Because I never went to biology class in high school.

One of my degrees was a science degree in biology.