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All Quotes by author - Christian de Duve
" Although attracted by the humanities, I had chosen medicine as a career, seduced by the image of the 'man in white' dispensing care and solace to the suffering. But science was lurking around the corner, in the form of an unpaid student assistantship in the laboratory of physiology. "
Man
Suffering
Care
" Although separating mitochondria and microsomes might appear worlds apart from the determination of the molecular weight of macromolecules, certain concepts were common to the two operations and could be usefully transposed from the latter to the former. "
Determination
Common
Two
" Due to these various circumstances, when I entered the Catholic University of Louvain in 1934, I had already travelled in a number of European countries and spoke four languages fairly fluently. This turned out to be a valuable asset in my subsequent career as a scientist. "
Career
University
Circumstances
" I believe that the writers of Genesis had detected the inherent selfishness in human nature that I propose is in our genes, and invented the myth of original sin to account for it. It's an image. I am not acting as an exegete - I don't interpret scripture. "
Believe
Human Nature
I Am
" I followed lectures on the history, geography, economy and political organization of Sweden. "
Organization
Sweden
History
" If you want this planet to continue being habitable for everyone that lives here, you have to limit the number of inhabitants. Hunters do it by killing off the old or sick animals in a herd, but I don't think that's a very ethical way of limiting the population. "
Limit
Think
Want
" 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. "
Good
Understanding
Live
" In spite of the advances of medicine, deathly epidemics are more menacing than ever before. "
Medicine
Spite
More
" I promptly fell in love with scientific research and soon had assigned myself, as a major vocation, the task of elucidating the mechanism of action of the antidiabetic hormone. "
Task
Action
Love
" It would be an exaggeration to say I'm not afraid of death, but I'm not afraid of what comes after, because I'm not a believer. "
Because
Would
Say
" My education, according to the tradition of the Jesuit school which I attended, had been centered on the 'ancient humanities', and I was strongly attracted to the more literary branches. "
Been
Education
Tradition
" My parents, of Belgian-German extraction, were Belgian nationals who had taken refuge in England during the war. They returned to Belgium in 1920, and I grew up in the cosmopolitan harbour city of Antwerp, at a time when education in the Flemish part of the country was still half French and half Flemish. "
City
Up
War
" Our investigations were very fruitful. They led to the discovery of a new cell part, the lysosome, which received its name in 1955, and later of yet another organelle, the peroxisome. "
Fruitful
New
Name
" Overcrowded cities are spawning increasingly lawless suburbs. Waste is accumulating in and around them, straining the capacity to deal with it. "
Capacity
Suburbs
Deal
" The advantage of the analytical approach is that it is widely applicable, and it can provide a considerable amount of quantitative information even with a relatively poor resolving power. "
Even
Information
Poor
" The cost of our success is the exhaustion of natural resources, leading to energy crises, climate change, pollution, and the destruction of our habitat. If you exhaust natural resources, there will be nothing left for your children. If we continue in the same direction, humankind is headed for some frightful ordeals, if not extinction. "
You
Children
Energy
" The living world has become impoverished. Species are being lost every day. Energy and other resources are nearing exhaustion. The environment is deteriorating. Pollution is everywhere. Climate is changing. Natural balances are threatened. "
Day
Lost
Energy
" The possibility that lysosomes might accidentally become ruptured under certain conditions, and kill or injure their host-cells as a result, was considered right after we got our first clues to the existence of these particles. "
Existence
Right
Result
" The war broke out, and for a number of years I lived in darkness, with the memory of the lakes, the trees and the skies of Sweden, until I returned in 1946 to spend two unforgettable years in the laboratory of Hugo Theorell. "
Darkness
War
Skies
" Vast areas are witness to the struggles of destitute populations trying to survive under unlivable conditions. "
Survive
Struggles
Witness
" We are sick because our cells are sick. "
Because
Cells
Our
" We have access to practical, ethical and scientifically established methods of birth control. So I think that is the most ethical way to reduce our population. "
Think
Way
Birth
" We know that once we stop learning and call ourselves learned, we become useless members of the scientific society. "
Stop
Society
Learning
" What would help us preserve our natural resources are genetic traits that let us sacrifice the present for the sake of the future. You need wisdom to sacrifice something that is immediately useful or advantageous for the sake of something that will be important in the future. "
Wisdom
Help
You
" When I disappear, I will disappear; there'll be nothing left. "
Nothing
Disappear
Left
" 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. "
Band
Who
Still
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