In spite of the advances of medicine, deathly epidemics are more menacing than ever before.

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.

They might in the future more than ever before engage in hunting beavers.

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.

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 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.