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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.

Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose.

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

We finally understand in general terms how a cell is organized, how its specialized organs function in a well integrated manner to insure its survival and replication.

Biology is far from understanding exactly how a single cell develops into a baby, but research suggests that human development can ultimately be explained in terms of biochemistry and molecular biology. Most scientists would make a similar statement about evolution.

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.

There's something really beautiful about science, that human beings can ask these questions and can answer them. You can make models of nature and understand how it works.

I am interested in how cells know what they are and how they should behave in their proper place in the body.

I became aware of the very complex internal organization in a cell from the basic science classes, and it made me think about how all that could work. It seemed like a great mystery, especially how organelles in the cell can be arranged in three dimensions, and how thousands of proteins could find their way to the right location in the cells.

I was driven completely by a desire to understand how cells worked.