Christian de Duve Quotes

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

I fell in love with the elegance and precision of genetic analysis and experimentation to answer profound biological questions.

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

When I was in high school, I became interested in cytochemistry: chemical analysis under the microscope, and trying to understand the composition of cells.

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.

For a decade, I had been studying a transparent worm, the C. elegans. I immediately thought, if you could put the G.F.P. gene into C. elegans, you'd then be able to see biological processes in live animals. Until then, we had to kill them and prepare their tissues chemically to visualize proteins or active genes within cells.

I knew the ribosome was going to be the focus of Nobel prizes. It stands at the crossroads of biology, between the gene and what comes out of the gene. But I had convinced myself I was not going to be a winner.

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.

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

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.

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.

I have had the good fortune to live - as an inside witness and, even, a modest participant - at a time when our understanding of this wonder we call 'life' has made its most revolutionary advances.

But while doing that I'd been following a variety of fields in science and technology, including the work in molecular biology, genetic engineering, and so forth.

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.

We're scientists; we're curious about how nature works, but we're also do-gooders. It's fantastic to think that the same experiments we'd do to understand how information gets into cells could have a practical side to them, too.

It is particularly pleasing to see how purely basic research, originally aimed at testing the genetic identity of different cell types in the body, has turned out to have clear human health prospects.

I would be the worst biologist in the world!

I started taking a basic biology course, and I really loved it. I started asking research questions incessantly. I was drawn very quickly to biology.

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.

Biological knowledge is doubling every five years.

The major thing is to view biology as an information science.