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Judah Folkman
Cancer Research
One time I wrote this big grant in the '70s that outlined the whole field as it almost is today. That there would be inhibitors and stimulators, and you could turn off blood vessel growth, and there wouldn't be drug resistance, and you shouldn't attack the tumor so directly. Laid it all out. And then I got cold feet, and I went to him and said, "I think I'm giving away too much." And he looked at it and he said, "No, it's theft-proof." He said, "They're never going to believe this. You'll have to ram it down their throat and it will take you ten years." He said, "Very interesting." And then also my wife Paula, many, many times. It would be very upsetting to get rejections from journals many, many times, and rejections from grants and things, and you think that the work is really -- I remember one time in the study section, "Haven't we funded this work long enough?" It didn't seem to be going anywhere. It was hard work. They were going to just stop all the funding. And Paula would always say, "Well, what do you care? If you really think it's right, you should go on."
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Shelby Foote
Novelist and Historian
Shelby Foote: It's not different to me at all whether I made the facts up out of memory or imagination, or got them out of documents. They're all facts to me, and they're to be dealt with as a novelist would deal with them. I don't mean by that that you have any license as a historian to invent. In fact, that ruins it. You have to be entirely accurate. But a novelist feels that same way about his imagined facts; he has to be true to them. I don't find any difference really, once the research is done or the imagination is through fooling with it. They're very much the same.
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Milton Friedman
Nobel Prize in Economics
We went out to Wisconsin on a visiting arrangement for a year, the University of Wisconsin's Department of Economics. I got embroiled in the center of an internal dispute. It really was quite a storm. There was a conflict. There was a business school that was trying to take over the economics department, and there was a dean of the arts and sciences who was trying to improve what he thought was a mediocre economics department. He offered me a tenured position at Wisconsin and I accepted it. But then, all hell broke loose. The people of the business school and some of the people in the economics department started to complain about how this arrogant dean was trying to force me down their throats, and I was just this young brash man from New York, and he was offering me a higher salary. I think it was all of -- what was it -- $2,600 a year? I think that was it. Maybe it was $3,000. It was that order of magnitude. He was offering me that, and that was higher than they were paying somebody else. So anyway, as I say, the real thing that was happening was a dispute between the economics department and the school of business. But I became the center of it, and it also involved elements of anti-semitism. In Wisconsin, this was in 1940, when the war had started in Europe, but not here. Wisconsin, as you know, had a large German population and there were a number of people in the economics department who were very strong sympathizers with Germany. And as is not surprising, I was not, and I spoke it very openly, my belief that the United States ought to go to war on the side of the Allies. So at any rate, that got involved. When it got to that point, I quit. I asked the dean to withdraw my name from consideration and quit. Nonetheless, that was a very traumatic experience. I have since been involved in similar public disputes, but that was the earliest and the defining one, if I may say so, for me.
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