Why did you become a scientist?
|  |
Well, the real question is why didn't I? You know, my mother was a doctor. My uncle was a doctor. My uncle's cousins were doctors, almost all of them. My great uncle was a doctor. So the real question is why is it that I went all through college -- you know, I graduated as an economics major -- and why is it that it was only a couple years after that I decided I wanted to go to medical school? That's an interesting question and undoubtedly involves deep psychoanalytic problems.
|
Whom do you most admire, and why?
|
| |
Historically, I suppose Descartes. I had a teacher once, a good teacher. His name was Barry Campbell. And he used to say, "You could tell how big somebody was by how long he held up progress." And Descartes has held up progress for about 400 years. I mean, that's world class, you know?
|
What are the key developments in your field?
“If you have peace, you can build all kinds of great stuff. And if you're going to have war all the time, you're not going to be able to build much at all that lasts.”
| |
| |
According to Winston Churchill, something I read by him, there were more baths and more houses with interior heating in England in the year 50 A.D. than there were in the year 1900. And that's because of the Pax Romana. If you have peace, you can build all kinds of great stuff. And if you're going to have war all the time, you're not going to be able to build much at all that lasts. So that's the biggest single problem there is.
|
What advice do you have for young people?
|
| |
The first thing you have to do is find out what your natural endowment is. And then you want to be sure that you have a good idea of how you're going to cultivate your natural endowment. The first thing people have to find out are what they're good at. Now, the trouble is that society rewards some talents much more than other talents. That's a fact. So if you're anxious to get a shiny sports car, which almost any teenager is, you're not going to encourage your natural talents. You're going to do whatever it takes to get the shiny sports car.
|
|
|
|
