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Our cells engage in protein production, and many of those proteins are enzymes responsible for the chemistry of life.

As has repeatedly been stated, the underlying hypothesis, which in a number of cases has been supported by direct experimental evidence, is that each gene controls the production, function, and specificity of a particular enzyme.

At the end of the 1970s, I was a young researcher at the Weizmann Institute with an ambitious plan to shed light on one of the major outstanding questions concerning living cells: the process of protein biosynthesis.

We discovered a mechanism which is like the garbage machine of the body. We need to remove damaged proteins and create new ones in their place, and we discovered the machine that does this.

Moreover the incorporation requires the same components needed for protein synthesis, and is inhibited by the same inhibitors. Thus the system is most unlikely to be a complete artefact and is very probably closely related to genuine protein synthesis.

As a general rule, biology tends to be conservative. It's rare that evolution 'invents' the same process several times.

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.

Proteins are the machinery of living tissue that builds the structures and carries out the chemical reactions necessary for life.

The problem of different sensitivities of distinct protein groups to lysosomal inhibitors has remained unsolved and may have served as an important trigger in the future quest for a non-lysosomal proteolytic system that may be involved in at least certain aspects of intracellular protein degradation.