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Desmond Tutu
Nobel Prize for Peace
We were wonderfully encouraged by what blacks were achieving in the United States. I recall when I was about nine picking up a tattered copy of Ebony magazine and I think -- I mean, maybe journalists ought to know just how much power they actually have because here I was 10,000 miles away from America with this copy of Ebony magazine and it was describing the exploits of Jackie Robinson and how he broke into major league baseball. Now I didn't know baseball from ping pong but what was so important for me, what made me grow inches was to know that a black guy had triumphed over all of the obstacles that were placed in his way and there he was now playing for something called Brooklyn Dodgers. Now I didn't know Brooklyn Dodgers. I didn't know Jackie, but it helped to exorcise what is the most awful consequence of racial injustice and it is the sense -- this demon of self-hate when you have a very low self-esteem.
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Desmond Tutu
Nobel Prize for Peace
Archbishop Desmond Tutu: I wanted to become a doctor, a physician, and I was admitted to medical school, but my family did not have the money for fees. So I ended up becoming a teacher. I stopped being a teacher when the South African Government introduced a deliberately inferior education for blacks called Bantu education, and I felt I wasn't ready to collaborate with this apology for an educational system. Our children, the 1976 kids who revolted against apartheid in Soweto, called it "gutter education," and it was gutter education. I left teaching. Of course, I didn't have too many option, and mercifully, the Bishop of Johannesburg at that time accepted me for training for the priesthood. So I came to the priesthood, as it were, by default.
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Desmond Tutu
Nobel Prize for Peace
The South African government for some odd reason had ignored my letter where I warned. I didn't have any sort of premonition, although I felt there was something in the air, but when it happened, when June the 16th happened, 1976, it caught most of us really by surprise. We hadn't expected that our young people would have had the courage. See, Bantu education had hoped that it was going to turn them into docile creatures, kowtowing to the white person, and not being able to say "boo" to a goose kind of thing, you know, and it was an amazing event when these school kids came out and said they were refusing to be taught in the medium of Afrikaans. That was -- that was really symbolic of all of the oppression. Afrikaans was the language they felt of the oppressor, and protesting against Afrikaans was really protesting against the whole system of injustice and oppression where black people's dignity was rubbed in the dust and trodden underfoot carelessly, and South Africa never became the same -- we knew it was not going ever to be the same again, and these young people were amazing. They really were amazing.
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Desmond Tutu
Nobel Prize for Peace
The leader is the servant. So leadership is not having your own way. It's not for self-aggrandizement. But oddly, it is for service. It is for the sake of the led. It is a proper altruism. Now that paradigm sounds hugely unrealistic, idealistic, something for dreamers, namby-pamby -- when you think of our current world as a world of cutthroat competitiveness, dog-eat-dog, where stomach ulcers become status symbols, survival of the fittest, everyone for himself, herself, and the devil take the hindmost. And yet, you see, if you live by this latter code in your corporation, in your school, in whatever organization, you may indeed succeed, but it is at very, very great cost. You end up being feared rather than loved, as happened with a former state president of South Africa's, P.W. Botha, when the knives were out for him. No one, not even his closest associates, mourned his departure. And so they frequently say, "On your way up, be nice to those you meet. You might encounter them on your way down."
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John Updike
Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction
John Updike: I didn't set out to become a reviewer much, but I did. I was a New Yorker writer and looking for any way in which I could appear in the magazine and sell, and I began to drift into reviewing by 1960, not very many at first. They had other reviewers, but as they died off, I became for a while almost the main reviewer. I did more reviews than anybody else, and you could say I was doing too many. I did try to avoid American contemporaries, many of whom, as you say, I knew, because who knows where envy or friendship enter in and distort the honesty of the book report. So, I tried to review foreign, dead or European or Latin American writers. There was a lot of ferment and magic realism. The novel in Europe was much more overtly experimental than I'm aware of it being now. So I thought there were things I could learn, just as a reader, from reading these books, so I tried to read books that would further my own education, as well as earn me the money of the book review and keep me up.
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John Updike
Two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction
It's very easy -- when you've written for those three or four hours -- your appetite for words is rather diminished, so it's all too easy to not read much, so the reviews did keep me reading and acquainted with trends. Trends in what do we do with this old dinosaur -- the novel. Because the novel is a very capacious plastic. It's sort of what you make it, and it's taken many forms. Ulysses is -- you can't repeat that, but that is an example of a novel that really tried to do everything. So we post-moderns are faced with this notion that maybe we're not taking it far enough. We're accepting the old conventions, quote marks and "he said, she said," when we had these experimental writers who have done so much. So anyway, it's good in a way to make yourself think about these basic issues. Why are you doing this at all? What are you bringing to it that's different? Are you just feeding the machine or are you in some way altering the machine? All these things are probably up to a point useful, but in the end you're left with your own intuitions and your own sense of -- whatever -- beauty or meaning or urgency.
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Bert Vogelstein
Cancer Researcher
When I went to college I initially thought I was going to major in pre-med kind of courses, but I took math courses and I found them much more intellectually stimulating than the standard pre-med courses. So, I decided to major in mathematics and, in fact, went to graduate school in mathematics for a year. I finished college early, so I had an extra year to kind of fool around, and I went to graduate school. I took graduate courses in math. And, I began to feel, even though math was incredibly intellectually stimulating, it didn't have the practical edge that I wanted. I wanted to be able to do something for people.
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Bert Vogelstein
Cancer Researcher
Our laboratory was right above the radiation therapy unit. Radiation therapy, of course, is where cancer patients get x-rays treatments for their disease. And in order to get to our laboratory, I actually had to walk through the radiation treatment area. And, every day we'd come in and we'd see dozens of patients lined up waiting to get these treatments, and they were all very sick, many of them were in wheelchairs. You could see that they were just in terrible shape; most of them you knew were going to die relatively soon. And, you couldn't possibly walk through that room and not run up the stairs and start working. It just continually reinforced the idea that this is a disease, people are getting it, they shouldn't get it, we've got to do something about it.
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