"When I went to the University, the medical school was the only place where one could hope to find the means to study life, its nature, its origins, and its ills."

Life

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This quotation examines the core nature of Life as articulated by Albert Claude. Within historical and literary traditions, reflections on Life provide actionable mental models, challenging individuals to evaluate personal ethics, self-discipline, and daily actions.

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About Albert Claude

Albert Claude was a Belgian-American cell biologist and medical doctor who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1974 with Christian de Duve and George Emil Palade. His elementary education started in a comprehensive primary school at Longlier, his birthplace. He served in the British Intelligence Service during the First World War, and got imprisoned in concentration camps twice. In recognition of his service, he was granted enrolment at the University of Liège in Belgium to study medicine without any formal education required for the course. He earned his Doctor of Medicine degree in 1928. Devoted to medical research, he initially joined German institutes in Berlin. In 1929 he found an opportunity to join the Rockefeller Institute in New York. At Rockefeller University he made his most groundbreaking achievements in cell biology. In 1930 he developed the technique of cell fractionation, by which he discovered the agent of the Rous sarcoma, as well as components of cell organelles such as the mitochondrion, chloroplast, endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi apparatus, ribosome, and lysosome. He was the first to employ the electron microscope in the field of biology. In 1945 he published the first detailed structure of cell. His collective works established the complex functional and structural properties of cells.

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More by Albert Claude

"Looking back 25 years later, what I may say is that the facts have been far better than the dreams. In the long course of cell life on this earth it remained, for our age for our generation, to receive the full ownership of our inheritance."

— Albert Claude
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"But, in the name of the experimental method and out of our poor knowledge, are we really entitled to claim that everything happens by chance, to the exclusion of all other possibilities?"

— Albert Claude
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"This attempt to isolate cell constituents might have been a failure if they had been destroyed by the relative brutality of the technique employed. But this did not happen."

— Albert Claude
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"For this equilibrium now in sight, let us trust that mankind, as it has occurred in the greatest periods of its past, will find for itself a new code of ethics, common to all, made of tolerance, of courage, and of faith in the Spirit of men."

— Albert Claude
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More about Life

"Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits."

— Robert Louis Stevenson
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"Wisdom principle 104 tells us that the journey of life is lesson 98."

— Natalie Clifford Barney
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"Wisdom principle 2 tells us that the journey of life is lesson 6."

— Earle Basinsky
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"Wisdom principle 72 tells us that the journey of life is lesson 92."

— George Baxt
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