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Christian de Duve - The boundaries of freedom in research (74/106)

80 views · Published 11 July 2017 · 1:37 · Indexed 17 October 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Science & Technology

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Belgian biochemist Christian de Duve (1917-2013) was best known for his work on understanding and categorising subcellular organelles. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1974 for his joint discovery of lysosomes, the subcellular organelles that digest macromolecules and deal with ingested bacteria. [Listener: Peter Newmark; date recorded: 2008]

TRANSCRIPT: You know, there's a lot of basic research going on in... in this institute, and applied research is... is not really a major... a major activity or major concern; it’s more something that people are asked to have at the back of their minds. If something can... if some application can be done, we work in collaboration with the hospital. So it... it works all right. When I said we let the people do what they want – as I said, that was the philosophy of Rockefeller, so that's where that philosophy came from, and if we do that... I did correct the statement to some extent by saying we allow that within the general framework or philosophy of the institute, so whatever they do, they can do freely, provided it falls within our general philosophy and within our general facilities. If somebody would come here and start something in a completely new field, maybe we would not accept that because we're too small. There's no neural biology, for instance, going on in the ICP [International Institute of Cellular and Molecular Pathology]  and we would, perhaps, hesitate to start a group in neurobiology because it's such a complex field that, unless you have a certain critical mass, they... they will not be very efficient.

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