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Judah Folkman
Cancer Research
There's a fine line between persistence and obstinacy, and you never know when you've crossed it. So mostly, as I observed other scientists and read about them, many of them had given up. Fleming gave up on penicillin. He discovered it in the late '20s, tried to purify it, failed, and wrote in 1932, "I give up." He said, "This will never be useful because it's too unstable." And so it waited until 1941 till Florey and Chaine could figure out how to purify it. All three got the Nobel prize. So had he persisted, he might have had it many years earlier. There are many, many, many examples in science.
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Judah Folkman
Cancer Research
The obstacles mainly were in the very beginning, in the late '60s, when we proposed the idea that tumors need to recruit their own private blood supply. That was met with almost universal hostility and ridicule and disbelief by other scientists. Because the dogma at that time was that tumors did not need to stimulate new blood vessels, they just grew on old ones. And that even if they could, after we showed it, the next disbelief was it didn't make any difference; it was a side effect like pus in a wound. So if you said you were studying wound healing and you found pus, they said you were studying a side effect, it's not important. And then after we showed it was important, which took us about five years (and we said there would be specific signals, molecules that would stimulate this, everyone said -- pathologists, surgeons, basic scientists -- said, "No, that's non-specific inflammation. You're studying dirt." They used to say, "You're studying dirt. There will be no such molecules." And then when we actually proved that there was -- that was now 1983 (starting in the late '60s), we had the first molecule. They said, "Well, but you'll never prove that that's what tumors use." So it was each step.
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Judah Folkman
Cancer Research
The nay-sayers keep coming. There are always nay-sayers. And now they say, "Well, it works in mice, but it won't work in people." So I say, "So what? Should we not test? Should I stop because you know for sure?" And people come up, stand up at meetings, "I'm very perturbed. It cannot work in people, must not work in people. This only works in mice." So I do two things. I say, "Will you sign?" I have a little book that I carry. I say, "Will you sign for me? Because you're so sure, I can just publish your remarks directly and save a lot of government and taxpayers' money, and we won't do the experiments. We won't test in humans. We'll just say it won't work." And then you get this body reaction. And then I also have -- there's a slide that I have for occasional -- I don't get this so much any more, but the slide is the New York Times, and it's 1903, and it's two Harvard professors, on the front page, have shown the exact mathematics of physics -- these professors of physics -- of why it is impossible for man to fly, because you can't build a motor that could lift its own weight. And three months later they took off at Kitty Hawk, or four months, something like that.
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Shelby Foote
Novelist and Historian
I don't want anything to do with anything mechanical between me and the paper, including a typewriter, and I don't even want a fountain pen between me and the paper. I use an old-fashioned dip pen like you used to see in post offices. It makes me take my time, and I feel comfortable doing it, whereas the clatter of a typewriter or to turn the drum backward to make a correction, all that's a kind of interruption I can't stand. And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.
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Carlos Fuentes
Author, Scholar & Diplomat
Carlos Fuentes: A writer is no different than a bricklayer or a bus driver in that sense. You must have discipline. Oscar Wilde said that writing is 10 percent genius, 90 percent discipline. You must have discipline for writing. It is not an easy task. It is very lonely. You're all alone. You are not in company. You are not enjoying yourself in that sense. You are enjoying yourself in another sense. You are delving into your depths, but you are profoundly lonely. It is one of the loneliest careers in the world. In the theater, you are with companions, with directors, actors. In film. In an office. In writing, you are alone. That takes a lot of strength and a lot of will to do it. You must really be in love with what you're doing to tolerate the huge loneliness of writing.
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Carlos Fuentes
Author, Scholar & Diplomat
I have friends who have practically died from writer's block. I had a good Chilean friend, José Donoso, a novelist, who had such a writer's block that I think it killed him eventually. He was so anguished. He suffered so much from that. I have never, thank God, suffered from writer's block. Never. That's why I produce so many articles and speeches and lectures at the same time, because when I do have writer's block for literature, I say, "Now is the time to write that speech. Now is the time to write that op-ed piece." So I am a well-oiled writing machine. I am always on the job.
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