It is the cells which create and maintain in us, during the span of our lives, our will to live and survive, to search and experiment, and to struggle.

Small bodies, about half a micron in diameter, and later referred to under the name of 'mitochondria' were detected under the light microscope as early as 1894.

Is it absurd to imagine that our social behavior, from amoeba to man, is also planned and dictated, from stored Information, by the cells? And that the time has come for men to be entrusted with the task, through heroic efforts, of bringing life to other worlds?

Life, this anti-entropy, ceaselessly reloaded with energy, is a climbing force, toward order amidst chaos, toward light, among the darkness of the indefinite, toward the mystic dream of Love, between the fire which devours itself and the silence of the Cold.

I remember vividly my student days, spending hours at the light microscope, turning endlessly the micrometric screw, and gazing at the blurred boundary which concealed the mysterious ground substance where the secret mechanisms of cell life might be found.

No doubt, man will continue to weigh and to measure, watch himself grow, and his Universe around him and with him, according to the ever growing powers of his tools.

Until 1930 or thereabout biologists [using microscopes], in the situation of Astronomers and Astrophysicists, were permitted to see the objects of their interest, but not to touch them; the cell was as distant from us, as the stars and galaxies were from them.