My parents, of Belgian-German extraction, were Belgian nationals who had taken refuge in England during the war. They returned to Belgium in 1920, and I grew up in the cosmopolitan harbour city of Antwerp, at a time when education in the Flemish part of the country was still half French and half Flemish.
Vast areas are witness to the struggles of destitute populations trying to survive under unlivable conditions.
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.
Speaking as a biologist, I think women are less aggressive than men, and they play a larger role in the early education of the young and helping them overcome their genetic heirloom.
I promptly fell in love with scientific research and soon had assigned myself, as a major vocation, the task of elucidating the mechanism of action of the antidiabetic hormone.
The possibility that lysosomes might accidentally become ruptured under certain conditions, and kill or injure their host-cells as a result, was considered right after we got our first clues to the existence of these particles.
We know that once we stop learning and call ourselves learned, we become useless members of the scientific society.
If you want this planet to continue being habitable for everyone that lives here, you have to limit the number of inhabitants. Hunters do it by killing off the old or sick animals in a herd, but I don't think that's a very ethical way of limiting the population.
Born in England during the First World War, of Belgian parents with partly German roots, I grew up in the cosmopolitan city of Antwerp, where I had the benefit of a classical education taught in the two national languages of Belgium: French and Dutch.
We have access to practical, ethical and scientifically established methods of birth control. So I think that is the most ethical way to reduce our population.
My education, according to the tradition of the Jesuit school which I attended, had been centered on the 'ancient humanities', and I was strongly attracted to the more literary branches.
The war broke out, and for a number of years I lived in darkness, with the memory of the lakes, the trees and the skies of Sweden, until I returned in 1946 to spend two unforgettable years in the laboratory of Hugo Theorell.
The living world has become impoverished. Species are being lost every day. Energy and other resources are nearing exhaustion. The environment is deteriorating. Pollution is everywhere. Climate is changing. Natural balances are threatened.
Ribosomes contain RNA, messenger RNA provides the information, transfer RNAs brings the amino acids; so the protein-making machinery is an RNA machinery, completely.
What would help us preserve our natural resources are genetic traits that let us sacrifice the present for the sake of the future. You need wisdom to sacrifice something that is immediately useful or advantageous for the sake of something that will be important in the future.
Although attracted by the humanities, I had chosen medicine as a career, seduced by the image of the 'man in white' dispensing care and solace to the suffering. But science was lurking around the corner, in the form of an unpaid student assistantship in the laboratory of physiology.