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Crystallographers believed in X-ray results, which are of course very accurate. But the x-rays are limited, and electron microscopy filled the gap, and so the discovery of quasicrystals could have been discovered only by electron microscopy, and the community of crystallographers, for several years, was not willing to listen.

This discovery convinced me of the power of crystallography and led me to continue in this field.

On the recommendation of my professor in experimental physics, Paul Scherrer, I took an assistantship for electron microscopy at the Biophysics Laboratory at the University of Geneva in November 1953. This laboratory was animated by Eduard Kellenberger, and it had two prototype electron microscopes requiring much attention.

I realized immediately that this was a terribly important discovery, but I didn't realize how important it would be until we had spent a lot of time in the laboratory studying it.

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.

On my return to Pittsburgh, I resolved to go back to the fundamental problems of electronic structure that I had contemplated abstractly many years earlier.

End of the sixties, Keith Blazey interested me to work on GdAlO3, an antiferromagnet on which he had done optic experiments. This started a fruitful cooperation on magnetic phase diagrams, which eventually brought me into the field of critical phenomena.

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.

Small bodies, about half a micron in diameter, and later referred to under the name of 'mitochondria' were detected under the light microscope as early as 1894.