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I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.

In the earlier years when I started this project at Stanford University, everyone told me it was nuts to go and try to reproduce the mysterious complexities that occur in a whole cell.

I remember the day we found the gene for the inter-species signaling molecule like it was yesterday. We got the gene, and we plugged it into a database. And we immediately saw that this gene was in an amazing number of species of bacteria. It was a huge moment of realization.

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

When I started my Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego, I was told that it would be difficult to make a new discovery in biology because it was all known. It all seems so absurd now.

I was a close observer of the developments in molecular biology.

Molecular biology has routinely taken problematic things under its wing without altering core ideas.

I started working on ribosomes when I was a post doc, in 1978, when it would have been impossible, really, to solve it. But, it was just a fundamental problem in biology.

If you wanted to dissect the structure of living cells, genetic analysis was an extremely powerful method, so my interest turned to that.

I loved the idea that biology was logical.