Christian de Duve, a Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine, is Professor Emeritus at the Catholic University of Louvain and at Rockefeller University, in New York. He is notably the author of Genetics of Original Sin (Yale University Press, 2010), Singularities (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Life Evolving (Oxford US, 2002), which were all very successful. He was born in 1917.

Christian de Duve is not only a great biologist whose work on cellular structure opened new research avenues in biochemistry and genetics; he is also a great humanist thinker.
In this short book, the author traces some of the major events of his intellectual trajectory, most notably how, despite his Roman Catholic education, he became a rationalist in the scientific tradition. He recounts here his second conversion and how he rediscovered the profound meaning of the Christian message for our times.
How can that message be infused with the necessary rallying power to escape the blind alleys of our biological destiny, which will doubtless lead to our destruction? These are some of the questions posed by a scientist with a strong moral conscience.

• Christian de Duve’s works are eagerly awaited by his large following.
• A great scientist’s spiritual legacy.