Jacques Dubochet

“We see chemistry, how the atoms are arranged in the molecules, how the disease changes the arrangement. Perhaps we will find which drug disentangles the aggregates that make a brain senile. Many of us are interested in such things.”

“The world is large, very large. My head is small, quite small. There is no way I can put the world in my head. Nevertheless, I have been trying to elaborate some kind of representation.”

“The trouble with vitreous water is that vitrification should be impossible.”

“A scientific prize is an ambiguous thing: it highlights an individual when we should highlight a collective effort, but I'm not alone.”

“We three have never been very good chemists but we are gratified with a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The Peter Principle says that everyone is promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. We are worried that we may have reached this remarkable point.”

“I hate personal competition, and so each time in my career I came in a field where it was highly competitive, I gave up.”

“Chemistry is the science of atoms. Elaborating on Democritus' idea, chemists learn how atoms stick or don't stick together, thus forming molecules.”

“It would be great if you could cool the water and immobilise the molecules, though keeping the structure, because when it's frozen, when it's immobilised, you can have it in the electron microscope and the water will not evaporate because in the electron microscope, it must be under vacuum, and water at normal temperature evaporates.”

“Rather big part of my time is to read scientific journals and to discover what others are doing.”

“In our group, it was a necessary requirement that one has to be able to collaborate.”