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I started working on ribosomes when I was a post doc, in 1978, when it would have been impossible, really, to solve it. But, it was just a fundamental problem in biology.

I began studying ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow in Peter Moore's laboratory in 1978.

The success in the determination of the high-resolution structures of ribosomal subunits and eventually the whole ribosome was the culmination of decades of effort.

The ribosome is a machine that gets instructions from the genetic code and operates chemically in order to produce the product.

I knew the ribosome was going to be the focus of Nobel prizes. It stands at the crossroads of biology, between the gene and what comes out of the gene. But I had convinced myself I was not going to be a winner.

Many ribosomes act simultaneously along the mRNA, forming superstructures called polysomes.

I remember reading a 'Scientific American' article about the use of new physical techniques - including neutron scattering - as a method for unravelling the structure of the ribosome. I was fascinated.

It's really hard for me to memorize the medical jargon if I don't know the meaning of every single word. So I do have to do a little Wikipedia/YouTube research to figure out what I'm talking about.

I've spent a lot of words on my own mortality.

By then, I was making the slow transition from classical biochemistry to molecular biology and becoming increasingly preoccupied with how genes act and how proteins are made.