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My prime interests are in evolution and development. I use the cellular slime molds as a tool to seek an understanding of those twin disciplines.

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.

I had a great time investigating the pigments of different mutant fruit flies by following experimental protocols published in Scientific American, and I also remember making my own beetle collection when it was still acceptable to make such collections.

The idea was to study fertilization in as many different phyla and organisms as possible, using the simplest possible equipment and a microscope. Biochemical approaches were not much in vogue, and running gels impossible at first.

In the 1970s, I did a Ph.D. with Fred Sanger in Cambridge who was in the process of inventing ways to map what's inside DNA. He later won the Nobel Prize.

After developing a primitive theory (1968) I therefore did not pursue this subject. However, the work was taken up by others and in 1974 the first experiments were done in the ISR.

I started doing experiments - mostly in organic chemistry, because it was so much more interesting - in my mother's laundry at home.

There was this enormous burst of sculptural creative juice in the nineteenth century, and all that stuff is just so decorative. Even in pieces cast from a mold, you get a more sensuous, handmade, individual sense from it.

From 1949 to 1953, I studied towards the diploma in Natural Sciences at the Swiss Polytechnical School in Zurich. It is in the last year of this study that I made my first contacts with fundamental research, when working on the isolation and characterization of a new isomer of Cl34 with a half-life of 1.5 seconds.

My first ideas of human in vitro fertilization (IVF) arose with my Ph.D. in Edinburgh University in the early 1950s. Supervised by Alan Beatty, my research was based on his work on altering chromosomal complements in mouse embryos.