John Sulston Interview (page: 7 / 7) Nobel Prize in Medicine	Print Interview

Either generally, or in your particular field, what characteristics or traits do you think are most important for achieving success? Satisfaction, achievement, whatever you call it.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. John Sulston: In one's life, in one's work, I think one must not have too set an idea about where you're going. It's more important to enjoy and believe in what you're doing now than to worry about where ultimately it's going. You should not, for example, set your eye on getting a prize, on getting a promotion. You should enjoy the process of what you're doing. And then, if you do succeed in getting some sort of acclaim, then of course you're doubly rewarded. That you both enjoyed the job and you get the acclaim. If you don't get the acclaim, then at least you've enjoyed the job. I think there can be nothing more miserable than to have neither. So I would always say to somebody, "Go the way that you believe in," and for a thinking person, of course, they won't just do something because it's fun, they will also want to feel there's something important. So it's that sense of going for what you enjoy, or going for what's important, which really matters. And that will give you, I'm sure, a satisfying life.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

If one of the young people at this Summit came to you and said, "Sir John, what is your advice?" What would you say?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. John Sulston: It's do what you want. Do what you think is important. I'm just saying, in another way, what most scientists who've reached a certain point in their career and asked the same questions say. Francis Crick famously called it the gossip test. He said the thing to do is to work on what you find you're gossiping about. So it's not what you think theoretically you ought to be working on, it's what you actually go and chat to people about. This obviously is what you care about. This is what you ought to be doing. It's good advice, I think, from Francis, and I say the same.

What haven't you done that you would like to do?

John Sulston: Almost everything. The hard part about doing anything is that there's a zillion other things that you're not doing. So the problem with choice is what you have to give up in order to do one thing. One quickly realizes that if you don't make a choice, then you'll never do anything. You can't advance on all fronts at once. There's some that have to be left for other people, as it were.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I would have liked to have been a physiologist. I would have liked to have been a physicist. I think I would love to be a space engineer. I would like to travel in space. I would like to go to Mars. I remember being so excited when I saw the first lander on Mars, I said, "I want a one-way ticket. I'm quite happy. Just give me supplies for six months. I'll spend six months on Mars and then die, that's fine, I don't care." I think I was serious, but, of course, I was not in a position to do it anyway. But the point that I'm making, I think, and this illustrates, is that everything we do is an exploration. Everything we do that's fun, it's absolutely in the nature of the human being to explore. So whether you explore inside, outside, whatever, it's just all exploration. But I think I do have a sense that I want us to go out there. I think it's so important that we travel. We go out away from earth, as soon as possible, actually. We really should put effort into that. I would like to be part of that. But it's not for me now.

In looking ahead to the 21st century, what do you see as the greatest challenge we face?

John Sulston: Ourselves. It's ourselves, our relationship with one another. Not individually, but in the blocs, particularly the blocs we call nation-states. We have to sort this out. We're actually at a very, very critical position in human history, indeed, possibly in the history of life on earth. We don't know whether that's true or not, to make such a large statement.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think it may well be that we are the only intelligent life in the universe. We certainly have no evidence that there's any other intelligent life. It may be that we have a very, very precarious and crucial role here. Now it's interesting to talk with people about that. Many people say, "Well, we're bad people. It'd be just as well if humanity didn't survive, because it does bad things all the time." I think doing bad things some of the time is an inevitable part of our intelligence. You know, we get excited, people get ambitious, we form groups, we therefore form opposing groups, we get into trouble. We've got more and more power. We've got more and more ability to make explosions, or to do other nasty things to one another, maybe biologically. All of these dangers are going to increase, and at the moment, we are not moving towards a resolution of this. We're not seeing from our leaders a sense that we are really coming together. Quite the reverse. All we hear are words of hostility. We hear about, for example, "the war on terrorism." What a ridiculous statement! War on terrorism? What are they talking about? They don't know what they're talking about. They are just seeing something which they perceive as a short-term risk and trying to make it into something larger. We desperately need to bring humanity together to overcome these real difficulties of security. But if we don't do it pretty soon, if we don't do it during this century, then we are not going to survive. Because some rogue person, rogue state as it's put, or some huge clash of opposing blocs that we risked during the last century, during the Cold War, will finally put paid to human life. Now as I say, some people say, "Oh, that doesn't matter. That's a failed experiment." The point is, it may never come back.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. First of all, we don't know what the chance of producing this kind of intelligence that we have was, how it was produced by evolution. We have no idea. Secondly, if there is another intelligent form of life, and there are sort of -- you know, there's other primates, there's the cetaceans and so on -- there are some bits of life on earth that might evolve. But they're not going to have such an easy time of it. We've used up all the easy ores, or the easy sources of energy, and the next one along is not going to have such an easy time of it. So it's not just becoming intelligent, it's also a matter of getting out of the Stone Age into the Iron Age, into the technological age, or rebuilding our knowledge. We are at a point now which is so precious, and if we could just hold onto that and think of that as being something that's worthwhile. Just really survival of the human race. If we could begin to have that mindset collectively, then I think that would be the huge achievement to the next century. I don't know what the chances are. Martin Rees says it's 50/50, just wrote a book about it, which I think is a very important signal that we may be about to destroy ourselves. But we have the opportunity to avoid that fate.

A sobering thought. Thank you very much.

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