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Charles Kuralt
A Life On the Road
I couldn't wait for school to be out so that I could go uptown, about a mile away and go to work. I loved working. And, I suppose I was, in that way, a little bit of what would be called today a nerd. I didn't have girlfriends and really I wasn't a very social boy. But, I just loved writing and working at the radio station. I missed a good deal, I think. I certainly didn't pay as much attention in class as I should have. My family would take family vacations, but I'd always stay home, because I didn't want to miss out on the work. So, I know that I paid a little bit of a price as a look back on it for this passion for working which I had when I was a kid.
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Charles Kuralt
A Life On the Road
I keep coming back to the passion for what I was doing. That was the overwhelming thing to me. Not where I worked or where I lived or how high I rose in the profession, but just the joy of carrying my portable typewriter to an event and trying to describe it. That was something I became pretty good at and naturally, when you're good at something, you love doing it. I think that must be true of physicists and of medical doctors and of musicians, all fields in which I am abysmally ignorant. But, I imagine that it's that enthusiasm, that passion for what you're doing that is most important in one's career.
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Ray Kurzweil
Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence
That was my first exposure in sort of being able to communicate with a large audience. It gave me some of the excitement of inventing, being able to move people with projects. That didn't directly help people in their lives, but that's the excitement of inventing as opposed to discovering science. Technology builds on science, but it really applies it to a way that moves people, and it is a form of magic. You take just a mundane set of materials, or a mundane set of computer instructions, but in just the right combination it does something that delights people, or maybe even helps them or changes their lives. And that's the exciting aspect of inventing for me.
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Meave Leakey
Pioneering Paleoanthropologist
I was always collecting insects and caterpillars and this and that. We had a very small cottage because it was the war years, so my father was away in the war. We were living in a small cottage in Kent with woods all around it. So I used to go out and collect all these little insects and things like that. I really loved nature even in those days. My mother said -- we had a little porch and the porch was full of jars of things that I used to feed everyday -- she had a number of stories of how I kept little furry caterpillars. I used to keep them on a matchstick and go to bed with them and then they'd get out in the night and there were furry caterpillars all over the bed. But I don't remember too much about it. I just remember vague things. I think the memories --you never know how much you remember and how much you've been told and you put things together. But I think, really, in those days I was interested. Then, my father was very interested in natural history, and as a child he had always done that sort of thing. He used to take a lot of photographs, so he taught me how to develop and print photographs when I got older. He had all these wonderful pictures of wildlife and birds, and snakes and lizards, and all sorts of things. I remember just loving spending time with him in the workshop and in the dark room. And learning how, and seeing all his photographs that he hadn't really looked at for years and years.
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Meave Leakey
Pioneering Paleoanthropologist
All scientists are driven by this enormous curiosity. They want to know why something does this, or why something looks like that, or how something works. Every scientist is just driven by this enormous curiosity to find the answer to some question. It's the same with us. We're wandering around in the desert, in the wind and the sun and the heat, and we know if we look hard enough, we're going to find a fossil that will tell us something we didn't know before. It's incredibly obsessive really. You just know if you keep at it, you know you're going to get the answer. The frustration is that you can't do it all the time, because you have to take breaks, and you have to write up, and you have to raise money and all this sort of thing. So I think that, for anyone going into science, whatever branch of science, they have that same curiosity that drives them.
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