|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Elizabeth Blackburn
Nobel Prize in Medicine
We went across the street to the apartment of somebody who had a TV -- not everybody had a TV -- so we could watch this (the moon landing). We had this great -- we watched this, you know, amazing thing. We all came back, and then I was doing my little biochemical analyses and nothing had fallen into place, and I lost a whole lot of the sample, and I thought, "This is not a good day for my science." But then very soon after -- the same samples -- I had analyzed them, and I suddenly thought about them in a different way, and suddenly everything fell into place. And ah, yes! Now I understood what was going on. So I remember that very well, because there was a sort of juxtaposition of the moon's triumph, my technical failure, and then, very quickly after, somehow things just kind of fell into place. You know, it was a very trivial problem now, but at the time, that process of going through it was something that I suddenly realized, the addiction to science. That "Ah!" You've suddenly seen a way through. You've seen how something is. You've understood how something works.
View Interview with Elizabeth Blackburn
View Biography of Elizabeth Blackburn
View Profile of Elizabeth Blackburn
View Photo Gallery of Elizabeth Blackburn
|
|
|
Elizabeth Blackburn
Nobel Prize in Medicine
The other side of what we do is we are very interested in how this does relate to cancer cells. So while we do experiments in simpler organisms, where we can get fast answers and they are complicated enough as they are, we also are trying to apply certain of these questions directly into human cancer cells and say, "What can we learn there, because there may be directions that could be, eventually, down the line perhaps, therapeutically useful. It would be wonderful to see. So maybe all this medical background is starting to sort of sneak out again, and everybody probably dreams that their research might do some concrete good, but you also know it's a long road, because drugs and therapeutics don't just fall into your lap. They're tough. Humans are complex, and things that work in cells, things that work in molecules really well, it's very complicated how it plays out in the whole human body. So you know, we can have great hopes, but we also know that things may never work out in quite the same way that we planned. But I have a hunch that they'll work out in some way. I'm just not exactly sure how it would play out
View Interview with Elizabeth Blackburn
View Biography of Elizabeth Blackburn
View Profile of Elizabeth Blackburn
View Photo Gallery of Elizabeth Blackburn
|
|
|
Norman Borlaug
Ending World Hunger
Norman Borlaug: Well, Dr. Stakman -- the kind of person he was -- he was old school. He may have been a plant pathologist, but he was a biologist in the broadest sense, and he wove into his lectures the story of going back to the first -- to the Bible -- to the rust epidemics. And so when I was asked to delay my arrival to the Idaho National to the first of June rather than the first of January, I said, "What am I going to do here?" And so I talked to Margaret also, and she said, "You were so impressed by Dr. Stakman, why don't you go and see him and see if you can register for graduate training for these six months?" And so I went to see him, told him my background, and he asked a lot of questions. I told him, "Well, this is kind of just to fill up six months." He said, "That's a pretty poor reason to go to graduate school." But he kept asking questions. And finally he said, "Okay, I'll accept you." And so, that's when everything started to change. At the end of that period, he got me an assistantship which paid a small amount so that the University job and the coffee shop had long since disappeared. But there were these other programs that Eleanor Roosevelt and the CCC (came up with) and so I worked on many of these things and was able to put together enough to live on.
View Interview with Norman Borlaug
View Biography of Norman Borlaug
View Profile of Norman Borlaug
View Photo Gallery of Norman Borlaug
|
|
|
J. Carter Brown
Director Emeritus
National Gallery of Art
J. Carter Brown: Oh, I was hopeless. I was very unathletic, and when I was in school I was two years younger than everybody in my class, so I got beaten up all the time, and I got laughed at for being interested in studying and doing stupid things like that. And, it's been so rewarding. I'm going to my 50th anniversary of my high school, and so rewarding that now they feel I'm the guy that sort of "made it" in the class, having been the Class Joke. Never completely "joke," because I was president of the Dramatic Society, and I did manage to graduate first in my class, but that wasn't the value system of that particular group of boys. They had an undefeated football season. They were really good at athletics, and the atmosphere at school was pretty anti-intellectual in those days.
View Interview with J. Carter Brown
View Biography of J. Carter Brown
View Profile of J. Carter Brown
View Photo Gallery of J. Carter Brown
|
|
|
J. Carter Brown
Director Emeritus
National Gallery of Art
Talking of ocean racing, one of the best lessons I learned was the concept of the rhumb line, R-H-U-M-B. You lay down a course from Newport to Bermuda, and that's your rhumb line. And then for some reason, you get blown off course. And, a lot of people make the mistake of saying, "Oh, we've got to get back to the rhumb line." There's a new rhumb line. It's from where you are to where you're going. And, it's so important to be able to pick up and forget all that and say, "Okay, play it where it lays." This is the new situation.
View Interview with J. Carter Brown
View Biography of J. Carter Brown
View Profile of J. Carter Brown
View Photo Gallery of J. Carter Brown
|
|
|
J. Carter Brown
Director Emeritus
National Gallery of Art
I've gone on, stayed on under my other hat as Chairman of the Fine Arts Commission. And boy, did we get it at the time of the Vietnam Memorial! I mean, I had Ross Perot in my office pounding the table! I knew that he'd sent in operatives to Iran. I didn't know what was going to happen to me. He wanted it his way. And, there was great brouhaha about that. Now, we have brouhaha about the World War II memorial. And, as of just a couple of days ago, that's all been ripped open again, and we've got to go to through more of these hearings where a small dissident group has ginned up a lot of complaint. And basically, it's a resistance to change. There's a nostalgia about the way things were, everybody thinks they were always that way. They forget that the Mall is a 20th century concept, and the Jefferson Memorial also had people lying down in front of bulldozers. But, it was built in 1941, and we have added and changed the Mall continuously, and this is only going to enhance the great design of the vista between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. And yet people just want to keep everything the way it is. And fine, sometimes it's better the way it is. But, we feel that this little Fine Arts Commission -- which are chosen to have some kind of credentials in the visual world -- has a lot of experience in visualizing what something's going to be. And, we think it's going to be okay.
View Interview with J. Carter Brown
View Biography of J. Carter Brown
View Profile of J. Carter Brown
View Photo Gallery of J. Carter Brown
|
| |
|
