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

One of the major lessons in all of biochemistry, cell biology and molecular medicine is that when proteins operate at the sub cellular level, they behave in a certain way as if they're mechanical machinery.

In many biological structures proteins are simply components of larger molecular machines.

I think you can say that life is a system in which proteins and nucleic acids interact in ways that allow the structure to grow and reproduce. It's that growth and reproduction, the ability to make more of yourself, that's important.

Owing to the difficulty of dealing with substances of high molecular weight we are still a long way from having determined the chemical characteristics and the constitution of proteins, which are regarded as the principal con-stituents of living organisms.

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.

Proteins are constantly being degraded. Therefore, simultaneous production of proteins is required.

The basic structure of proteins is quite simple: they are formed by hooking together in a chain discrete subunits called amino acids.

Nature - how, we don't know - has technology that works in every living cell and that depends on every atom being precisely in the right spot. Enzymes are precise down to the last atom. They're molecules. You put the last atom in, and it's done. Nature does things with molecular perfection.