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We dwell in the house of the body, but its perfection and intricate life are the work of a wisdom which never relaxes dominion over a single cell.

Especially for those of us who lived in single cells, you had the time to sit down and think, and we discovered that sitting down just to think is one of the best ways of keeping yourself fresh and able, to be able to address the problems facing you, and you had the opportunity, also, of examining your past.

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

I've done a lot of things in my life.

In my second year, after moving to the Medical School, I began the courses of Anatomy and Physiology. I had begun to see that I was interested in cells and their functions.

In another life - and as I like to say, another body - I used to teach aerobics.

I shall confess at the outset that it was only shortly after the beginning of this century that I entered active life - with a somewhat precocious capacity for involvement.

One's life has many compartments.

We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours.

We have entered the cell, the Mansion of our birth, and started the inventory of our acquired wealth.