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Francis Collins
Presidential Medal of Freedom
So I was kind of in a crisis. Here I was, already had a kid who was a couple of years old, and I was facing the idea of starting over again, and what to do. And I was pretty shaken up about whether research was the right thing for me or not. So I considered many options, and stayed up many nights wondering which was right. And finally decided, even though it had not been a childhood dream at all, that medicine was a really interesting option for me. That it would allow me to learn about the life sciences and see if there was something there that really grabbed my fancy in the way of research. But if that didn't happen, I knew I loved working with people. I knew I had this urge to try to do something for other human beings, an urge that I hadn't been able to experience quite in the way I wanted to in the physical sciences. And if I just ended up being a doc out in the hills somewhere, that would be okay too.
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Francis Collins
Presidential Medal of Freedom
Boy, I can remember when I first got into science, in genetics in a serious way, I felt the clock was ticking and I just had to do something meaningful. And I had to prove myself in short order, or everybody would figure out that I was really clueless and I had no talent, and was not going to pan out. And the first few months everything I tried failed. And I would go home at night just feeling so depressed and so discouraged and wondering, "Should I just quit?" I still remember that sort of intense feeling of failure. Not to say that I've gotten any better at this, I still fail at the same rate, but I think I've learned that that just comes with the territory. And it's okay to fail at the experiment. It doesn't mean you've failed as a human being. One has to learn that.
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Denton Cooley
Pioneer of Heart Transplants
Denton Cooley: I was operating with a surgeon who himself was handicapped. He had had a spinal cord tumor. He had one good hand, which was I think his left hand, which he used to operate. And he had one other arm, that was in sort of a brace. We had a patient with an aneurysm here, just under his breast bone. And I remember so well, we got the man anesthetized -- he was actually bleeding when he got in the operating room -- had the man anesthetized, and this surgeon reached down and pulled up the breast bone, and the blood hit the ceiling, and he put his finger in the hole in the aorta, and so he was completely immobilized. Because he had this other arm that he couldn't do much with, and so he said, "Cooley, it's your operation now. See what you can do to get my finger out of the hole." And that was the way that came about. I figured out a way to patch up the hole in the aorta, and the patient survived. But I remembered it was a task that was way beyond my experience at the time. And I wasn't prepared for anything that difficult.
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Denton Cooley
Pioneer of Heart Transplants
One of the most trying times in my career was when we did the first heart transplant. We put it into the patient, and wondered whether it was going to work. Suppose it had not functioned? We weren't certain at all that it would function. So that five or ten minutes, while we were waiting for that heart to regain its function, was one of the most difficult times of my surgical career. And I'm sure it's the same with other surgeons who have followed. Now we know that the heart will start up, and that's just part of the knowledge that we have gained through the years.
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