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Francis Collins
Presidential Medal of Freedom
One morning I walked in to see a young farmer who we had treated the day before for tuberculosis, and he looked at me and he said, "You know, I get the feeling that you're wondering why you're here." He said, "You came here for one reason. You came here for me, and that ought to be enough." And that sticks in my mind -- more than any moment I think I have experienced in my life -- as truth. We should have our grand dreams, we should pursue them, that's what being human is all about, that's part of the nobility of our enterprise. But we should never forget that what really matters is what you do one-on-one with a single human being. Where you reach out and you try to help them make their life a little better. And if that's all you do, your whole life is to do that occasionally, then you have succeeded.
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Francis Collins
Presidential Medal of Freedom
I think another obligation I have is not to imagine that my opinion on those matters is particularly weighty. I can weigh in when it comes to the scientific facts. When it comes to the uses to which genetics should be put, I don't think scientists like myself have any unique abilities to decide what's moral and ethical. We need everybody's input on that. And in that regard, I think I have to be careful not to use my own circumstance as the scientific leader of this project to imagine that I'm also in some special ethical position where my opinion must be the right one. That I think is something to constantly keep in front of me.
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Denton Cooley
Pioneer of Heart Transplants
I have visited many operating rooms around the country, and seen many really celebrated surgeons in the operating room. The ones that I admire the most are those who maintain a sort of even pattern of behavior, who treat their assistants and nurses well, and don't have flights of temperament or anger, and that sort of thing. To me, it just reflects their insecurity. I just don't believe that that's the way -- the pattern -- that I want to follow. I have five junior surgeons who are my associates, and none of them are temperamental. I selected them all because I liked their behavior in the operating room. In another institution, right here in our medical center, the surgeons are highly temperamental, and there are all sorts of histrionics going on in the operating room. You don't see that at the Texas Heart Institute.
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Denton Cooley
Pioneer of Heart Transplants
I don't lead by force, I lead by example. And if I can, set a good example. If I can set an example to my staff and my group, by being punctual, I come to work every morning, walk onto the hospital floor within two or three minutes of the same time every day, and they can depend upon it. I deplore these doctors who would show up, you know, an hour, a half hour late, because they were doing something else, or so on. If I say I'm going to be there, I am there every morning. And I am going to be there until I get my work done at night.
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Francis Ford Coppola
Filmmaker, Producer and Screenwriter
I wrote the script of Patton. And the script was very controversial when I wrote it, because they thought it was so stylized. It was supposed to be like, sort of, you know, The Longest Day. And my script of Patton was -- I was sort of interested in the reincarnation. And I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I wasn't fired, but I was fired, meaning that when the script was done, they said, "Okay, thank you very much," and they went and hired another writer and that script was forgotten. And I remember very vividly this long, kind of being raked over the coals for this opening scene. My point is that what I've learned is that the stuff that I got in trouble for, the casting for The Godfather or the flag scene in Patton, was the stuff that was remembered, and was considered really the good work.
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