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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Vast areas are witness to the struggles of destitute populations trying to survive under unlivable conditions.
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.
Overcrowded cities are spawning increasingly lawless suburbs. Waste is accumulating in and around them, straining the capacity to deal with it.
I followed lectures on the history, geography, economy and political organization of Sweden.
In spite of the advances of medicine, deathly epidemics are more menacing than ever before.
We are sick because our cells are sick.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We know that once we stop learning and call ourselves learned, we become useless members of the scientific society.
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.
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.
