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Barry Marshall
Nobel Prize in Medicine
Barry Marshall: I was always curious and very interested in science, and always enjoyed school. Each year I would always be thinking, "Wow! Next year at school, or at college, I'll be able to do chemistry, or geometry that I can't do now." Or in medical school it was, "Wow! Next year I'll be able to do anatomy!" Cutting up dead bodies was my big goal in first-year medicine, and so it went on. Every year there was something exciting and wonderful that I was looking forward to the next year. Medicine is like that, just so varied that even after I graduated I thought I only wanted to be a general practitioner. But every single sub-specialty I did in my internship, I'd come home from the first week and I'd say to my wife, "I want to be a neurosurgeon. This is great!" Or, "I want to be a hematologist," or cancer specialist. Everything fascinated me, and it was really only because I got involved in this little project with the bacteria in the stomach that I ended up going into gastroenterology. Because any specialty would have made me perfectly happy.
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Barry Marshall
Nobel Prize in Medicine
One of the things my wife says is that she actually has five children. She's got the four children and me, and that I never grew up. A lot of doctors seem to be in this category, in that they have always got this childish curiosity, and they go into med school because they can't face life, and they know it will be seven years before they actually have to make a real life decision. And then if you stay in medicine and train further for a specialty, you can postpone this real life event, if you like. And then if you can go into research Well, actually you never have to finish. I think that's the ideal choice.
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Johnny Mathis
Grammy Hall of Fame
Johnny Mathis: I think the thing that stands out most in my mind -- about how excited I was to have an opportunity to do something with my voice -- is when I met Lennie Hayton, who was married to Lena Horne. Lena Horne used to come through San Francisco on a regular basis at this wonderful hotel -- the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco -- in the Venetian Room. My dad would take me to see her. It was something electric and magnificent about her. First of all she was gorgeous. She was a beautiful woman, and she had a history of learning her craft. She was a wonderful singer and dancer. As a youngster, I would go and listen to her and watch her, and she would mesmerize me. That was the thing that motivated me most, I think, to continue to perform, not just sing for recreational purposes. But I remember she was the shining light. And then of course I went and saw other people who became fabulous in my mind also, but she was the one that I remember was the motivator for me. I said, "I would love to be able to be that good, have something, a quality that good." And all my life -- I told her. I finally got a chance, after I met her, to tell her. But her husband was very kind to me -- Lennie Hayton -- because Lena was a little standoffish. Because she was a black woman in a white world, doing all of these incredible things, making roads for people like myself, so Lena was a little bit standoffish. But her husband Lennie Hayton, who was white, used to sneak me to her dressing room and I'd sit out in the foyer until she was all dolled up and made up -- she wouldn't see me without her makeup -- and put her gown on, and that was the Lena Horne I always remember. I never saw her -- I think maybe once I saw her offstage when she wasn't all dolled up. But of course she was the person, I think, more so than Nat King Cole, who I almost emulated from the time I was a little kid, because he's my favorite singer. But she was this incredible person that I thought was the epitome of what it would be like to be a singing star.
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Ernst Mayr
The Darwin of the 20th Century
As Darwin put it about himself, I was born a naturalist. At the age of six, already I was a passionate bird watcher. My older brother had an aquarium, which we jointly took care of, and we caught little fish and little sticklebacks in the streams and ponds of the neighborhood, and snails and things, and watched all the water life, the larvae of insects living in the water. And my mother was a great collector of mushrooms. She knew not only the poisonous and the edible ones but she knew everything about the in between kinds of mushrooms, which is the majority. She really knew mushrooms well. And both of my parents took us three boys every weekend on a little excursion, on a hike, on a walk, and we studied the spring flowers or my father took us to a limestone quarry where we found ammonites and other fossils, or we went to a heron colony and watched that. Anyhow I was almost trained to be a naturalist.
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Ernst Mayr
The Darwin of the 20th Century
Ernst Mayr: Stresemann took to me and he saw my enthusiasm and he said, "Would you be interested, in your college vacations, to come here to the museum as a volunteer?" I thought somebody had given me a key to paradise. I said, "Of course, I would," and I did. And he put me to work unpacking new collections that came from expeditions in various places of the world and I was permitted to identify specimens that hadn't been yet identified and so forth. I had a wonderful time, and I had opportunity to talk with Stresemann about all sorts of things. And one day he said to me, after I talked about my dreams about the tropics of expeditions and the jungles and all that, he said to me very seriously, "Now look here, young man. If you become a medical doctor you will never have a chance to go to the tropics, you will be far too busy." When he saw how my face fell, he said, "Well, but there is an alternative. Let me make a proposal. Suppose, after you finish your first half of the medical study " -- in Germany the preclinical period and the clinical are sharply separated -- " after you've finished your preclinical period, why don't you stop studying medicine, take a degree in zoology, a Ph.D., and when you have that then I can find a place for you in an expedition somewhere, I'm quite sure."
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Ernst Mayr
The Darwin of the 20th Century
As soon as I had my candidate of medicine degree, I stopped medicine and I went into zoology, and I did something that is almost unbelievable. In 16 months I fulfilled all the requirements of a Ph.D. candidate in zoology, including a semester of philosophy and a great deal of botany and so forth, and I had written my thesis in that time. I was ready for the examination, and on the 24th of June my oral examinations were all completed and I was awarded a Ph.D. in zoology.
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