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Sir Roger Bannister
Track and Field Legend
Sir Roger Bannister: I was always a great bundle of energy. As a child, instead of walking, I would run. And so running, which is a pain to a lot of people, was always a pleasure to me because it was so easy. I wanted to have some success. I came from such a simple origin, without any great privilege, and I would say I also wanted to make a mark. It wasn't, I suppose, until I was about 15 that I appeared in a race. I was playing rugby and the other games English school children do, and there was an event which was planned in which races were run, and I simply just won these by a considerable margin. So, everybody thought I was just rather special.
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Sir Roger Bannister
Track and Field Legend
Medicine is complex. Indescribably difficult. It involves collaboration. There aren't lonely peaks. I mean, there are Nobel Laureates who work on one particular subject in isolation and are so clever that they are able to perceive what others cannot. And I was, of course, not that kind of a scientist, and clinical medicine is not like that, and I knew this. I knew it, and I chose it, because I felt that the capacity to apply yourself to be alert to new developments, and to be prepared to spend the time writing papers, would lead to a fascinating life in which a reputation would be created for hard work, for -- one hopes -- kindness and effectiveness in dealing with patients and clinical problems, and then ultimately the kind of problems of organizing medical committees and having a responsibility thrust upon one by colleagues who wished one to undertake particular duties of this kind.
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
I was highly interested in mathematics. It seemed to me to be a form of art, something very beautiful, geometry, mathematics, and the systematic way how it's built and so on. But I was somewhat bored by most of other issues that were taught at school and I became at the age -- from 13 maybe to 17, I was totally undisciplined and could not take any kind of discipline. So gradually I became a burden of the school. They asked me to go do something more productive maybe. I was -- I don't know, not hyperactive, I was a very shy introvert -- but to do something useful to work in the field, rather than spend my time in interrupting others that want to study. So I was expelled from high school in the last year. I was allowed to come to listen to the math hours and I spent the rest of the day working until I joined the army at a very early age.
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
Tito said that a good military unit is a social cell where shame -- the fear of being kind of shamed by the rest of the group -- is stronger than the fear of death. And there is something true about it, that works among youngsters well-trained and somehow understanding that they are serving a cause which is somehow more important than their own. No one really bothers you in battle with this kind of overstructure of ideology and devotion and so on. And we know, unfortunately, from world experience, that you can lead people to highly devoted and professional military activities under terrible kind of regimes with terrible ideologies. But somehow, with youngsters, it works. If they have got young leaders and they are trained together, they create this kind of self-reliance of the unit, so that they are not dependent on what happens in other parts of the battlefield, but they rely upon each other. It works, and they can reach kind of activities that are against, may I say, the individual instincts of anyone in the group.
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
I still remember going with my father from the collective dining room that I mentioned in the beginning and asking -- pointing to one of these Holocaust (survivors), a young woman, that came alone from Auschwitz or Majdanek -- I do not remember -- and she was taking a loaf of bread under her hand every evening from the dining room. And I asked my father why -- Anka was her name -- why Anka is taking this loaf of bread? There will be breakfast tomorrow. There will be bread on the table. He told me what hunger passed in her life will make her to her last day on earth taking this bread. She will never -- could be convinced that tomorrow there will be bread on the table. And so we -- you know, it is to a young kid of five years old or four years and a half, it kind of haunted me since then, and later on through all these wars I realized that we --that Israel is -- that we were born about the middle of last century, slightly before. Our generation did not learn the Alamo stories of his nation in the history books. We experienced them personally. It's a formative, personal, individual experience, a formative collective experience of the Israeli society. The bringing about of a Jewish sovereign entity that can defend itself, stepping back on the stage of real history. Not as a spiritual kind of heritage but as a real way of life for a people that suffered so much. So it became the kind of mobilizing factor of my life, and it gave a certain kind of meaning that you could not think of it when you are -- have to be alert to touch the trigger a split second before someone shoots at you. You don't think about history and so on. But somehow it was a kind of shaping for the whole generation that I was a part of.
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Gary Becker
Nobel Prize in Economics
Gary Becker: I originally was in mathematics and thought I would go into mathematics. I went to Princeton, planning to go into mathematics, but I had a strong interest -- I think inherited from the discussions we had in my family, with my father and my brothers and sisters -- to do some good for society, that was my orientation. And then by happenstance, I took an economics course in my freshman year. Part of the course dealt with the use of mathematics. They were using mathematics -- the textbook had -- using mathematics to discuss economic questions. And it struck me, "This seems ideal for me, given my mathematics, my interest in math. I can combine it now to learn about my social problems." That's when I made the shift, and so it was, in a sense, early on in my college career, which is earlier than most people get so excited about economics. But I did get excited then. I thought I can use this as a way of doing good, if you will, in understanding and helping society.
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Gary Becker
Nobel Prize in Economics
The only area I was precocious on was sort of an ability to calculate and do arithmetic, so I had some mathematical talent. I had a great love for math, love for social issues, trying to do something for society. I think those motivated me once I got to be a teenager. And then it was just a series of events, partly lucky. I went to Princeton, which is a great place. I didn't think I would get into Princeton, but they accepted me and I went there. Took the economics course, had a couple of good teachers when I was at Princeton, and a crisis in my study of economics when I was an undergraduate. I didn't feel finally concluded it wasn't dealing with these important social issues. And I thought for a while about becoming a sociologist. Tried sociology but found it too difficult. I couldn't really get on top of it, as I began to read. And so came back to economics reluctantly, went to the University of Chicago, and that was a major again, lucky. Most of my contemporaries, the advice we'd get would be to go to Harvard. And a lot, Princeton, in those days, if you were a good student and you wanted to go to grad school, you went to Harvard. I did get a very attractive offer from Harvard, but maybe this was my rebellious streak. I felt I wanted to do something different. Chicago seemed like... interesting. It was out in the Midwest. I hadn't been in the Midwest. It had a good department, I thought I'd try Chicago. And I did go to Chicago, and I encountered great teachers. Mainly I would say Milton Friedman had the greatest influence on me. And he taught me that you could use economics for powerful problems. That was really a revelation at that time. And I would say that was the next big, important event in my development.
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