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As soon as you go into any biological process in any real detail, you discover it's open-ended in terms of what needs to be found out about it.

Biology sometimes reveals its fundamental principles through what may seem at first to be arcane and bizarre.

All I do is look, listen and try to make sense of what I find, in biological terms.

Trying to understand fundamental processes that take place as organisms develop and how their various cells interact with one another - one can see what happens with those cells by asking questions about the fundamentals of biology.

In the earlier years when I started this project at Stanford University, everyone told me it was nuts to go and try to reproduce the mysterious complexities that occur in a whole cell.

We can track and see the production of single molecules, trace them and see how they assemble into structures.

In my lab, we are always thinking about how cells, bacterial cells, can talk to each other and then organize themselves into enormous groups that function in unison.

That's really what science is just trying to figure stuff out, and I like figuring stuff out.

It's nice to be able to look at one protein, but life is driven by the interactions between proteins, so it's really essential to be able to see multiple proteins at a time to understand these interactions.

If I have learned anything as a scientist, it is that one should not make things complicated when a simple explanation will do.