Belgian - Scientist | October 2, 1917 - May 4, 2013
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.
Christian de Duve
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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.
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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.
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We know that once we stop learning and call ourselves learned, we become useless members of the scientific society.
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Overcrowded cities are spawning increasingly lawless suburbs. Waste is accumulating in and around them, straining the capacity to deal with it.
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I cannot look at a question and not try to find the answer, even if I don't know it.
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Ribosomes contain RNA, messenger RNA provides the information, transfer RNAs brings the amino acids; so the protein-making machinery is an RNA machinery, completely.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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