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Sir Edmund Hillary
Conqueror of Mt. Everest
Sir Edmund Hillary: Not really. I had a number of friends who were interested in tramping and trekking around our local hills, but as I got older, I discovered that I tended to be rather more energetic and stronger walkers than they were and so I always seemed to be pushing young ladies up steep hills and clamoring up trees to find out where we were. And I sort of quickly became pretty active in that sort of way. I still wasn't doing anything of great consequence, but I was loving the out-of-doors and loving forcing myself to travel quickly around the countryside and do very long treks and I enjoyed it very much.
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Sir Edmund Hillary
Conqueror of Mt. Everest
I had a grandmother who was an Irish grandmother who came out to New Zealand and she was a wonderful old lady. She lived up to 96 years old and, even in her 90s, she had great vitality and great enthusiasm and a tremendous sense of fun. I know that for a while I was quite influenced by her spirit she showed during the latter days of her life. But, I really have no idea why I wanted to keep dashing on in these ways because I realized that it wasn't the normal attitude of the majority of young people. Most young people were more interested in going to the movies or going to the beach or something or other. I really wasn't all that great on that sort of stuff. I just wanted to get out in the hills.
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David Ho
AIDS Research Pioneer
I began with an interest in this medical curiosity, never realizing that this was going to be a big health problem for the public. But, the scientific aspect was extremely interesting in that here we were looking at something that was transmissible, capable of destroying the immune system. That was new and one way or another the science behind that would shed light on bugs and on the immune system. So, I was gung-ho from day one of the epidemic.
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David Ho
AIDS Research Pioneer
We also knew that if you gave the drugs one at a time, the virus replicates so fast that you will create the mutations necessary to become resistant to the drugs. And, therefore, if the drugs were given individually, the virus would find a way to evade the drugs. And so, during that period, we did a lot of mathematics to calculate what it would take to control the virus with great potency and with great durability. And, for a period in 1994, it was truly an exciting phase in my professional career. One would go to bed thinking about it, waking up in the middle of the night thinking about what we're looking at, what this piece of evidence means and how do we take this and translate it into practical application.
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Susan Hockfield
President Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
It wasn't until graduate school that I just fell in love with learning. Just fell in love with learning, and I could study for hours and days and it was a glorious feeling, and -- could've, would've, should've. You know, you think about what you could've done, what you might've done. I only wish I had discovered that kind of joy in learning earlier, because there are many things that I wish I knew now that I could've learned if I had been paying a little bit more attention to my studies. I have an older sister who was an astonishing student from the very beginning, and her interests and expertise lay more in the linguistic arts. She was a terrific language student, a very great reader. I mean, she was always reading. She liked history a lot. And in contrast, my intrinsic abilities took me more toward math and science, so it was a good contrast from having a sister who was about a year-and-a-half older than I was, going through school ahead of me doing astonishingly well. So you know, I got cut a little slack because my strengths were in math and science in contrast to hers. And because of that interest, it was imagined by my parents and myself that I would go to medical school -- kind of a standard thing. And while I had a deep interest, deep curiosity about how living things work -- or frankly, how all things work; I was forever taking things apart to figure out how they work -- medicine never felt exactly right to me. And it wasn't until I was in college that one of my professors suggested a different route which led me into research, and it was really the thing I had been looking for.
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Susan Hockfield
President Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
When I got to graduate school, and you got to spend all of your time reading about this thing for which you had an infinite curiosity and infinite enthusiasm, and you could talk to people who were studying and interested in the same things, that was just glorious. And so I think it really was that I had discovered this real-life manifestation of the thing I had been curious about since I was four or five years old -- you know, that it really finally came together. And as an educator, what you want for your students -- as a mother, what you want for your child -- is to find that thing, that pursuit that is intoxicating. Because when you fall in love with something, you can bring to it a level of commitment, a level of energy, level of curiosity, a level of persistence that is absolutely required for success. You just can't have success without that.
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