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Susan Hockfield
President Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Susan Hockfield: When I got to graduate school, it was suggested many times that I should perhaps not just get a Ph.D. but get a Ph.D. and an M.D. And it was funny, I started graduate school in January. I have done more things than probably would be good for me counter-cyclically. So rather than starting in September with everyone else, I started with January, just because that's the way it worked out. Actually, because I was anxious to start now. Once I've decided what I want to do, I want to do it now. I'm not a particularly patient person. And I had the remarkable good fortune to get a summer internship in a lab at the National Institutes of Health, a neurobiology lab. And so during the academic year from September through June I would take classes, and then from June through September I would be in the lab full-time, and I would try to get to the lab as much as I could during the course period of the year. And every time I thought about doing the M.D., all I could think about was that there would be long stretches of time when I couldn't be in the lab, and I just couldn't do it. I just could not imagine not being in the lab.
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Susan Hockfield
President Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Technology determines in a very important way what you can see, what you can do. You can't do experiments beyond what your technology allows, and often the breakthroughs come because you or someone else has figured out how to make that technology go a little deeper, go a little further, provide a little higher resolution. But early molecular biology required a huge vat of one kind of cells, multiplied over a zillion times, in order to find a single gene. So just the requirements of doing molecular biology experiments basically require that you had a single cell, and a hundred thousand copies of that single cell, in order to get your hands on a gene that was important in that cell. But by the late '70s, the techniques had gotten better, so that you could study a gene that was not expressed in a hundred thousand of the exact same cells, but you could actually find it in a complicated tissue like the brain. The brain has thousands and thousands of different kinds of cells. Some cells express these acetylcholine receptors, some don't. And the resolution of the molecular biology techniques finally began to allow you to look at a complicated tissue. And so I, as I started my own lab at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, had access to technologies that we really never had before, and that allowed us to look at what was happening at the level of individual cells in the brain. So I did all brain all the time, but I would no longer be characterized as a neuro-anatomist. I became a molecular neurobiologist and devoted the rest of my research real exclusively to questions of brain development mostly.
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Khaled Hosseini
Afghanistan's Tumultuous History
I was working full-time as a doctor then, so I would basically get up at about 4:45, 5:00 in the morning, and I would write the novel for about three hours and then get ready and leave, see my patients at 8:45, and then I would do it again the next day. But it became a routine for me. I learned a lot about myself that year. I learned a lot about what it takes to write a novel. There is a romantic notion to writing a novel, especially when you are starting it. You are embarking on this incredibly exciting journey, and you're going to write your first novel, you're going to write a book. Until you're about 50 pages into it, and that romance wears off, and then you're left with a very stark reality of having to write the rest of this thing. And that's where a lot of novels die. A lot of 50-page unfinished novels are sitting in a lot of drawers across this country. Well, what it takes at that point is discipline, and it really comes down to that.
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Khaled Hosseini
Afghanistan's Tumultuous History
You have to be more stubborn than the manuscript, and you have to punch in and punch out every day, regardless of whether it's going well, regardless of whether it's going badly. And I said to myself, "I'm going to wake up every day at 5:00, and I'm going to keep wrestling this thing until I've got it down, and I'm going to win this thing." And that's pretty much what it took both times to write my novels. It's largely an act of perseverance and outlasting the manuscript who really, really wants to, wants to defeat you. The story really wants to defeat you, and you just have to be more mulish than the story. And that's what it came down to. I'm being slightly facetious, but it really is, you really can't give up. And of course, at one point the story, something grabs, took hold of me, and at that point, there was no choice left. I was so taken with the story, and so swept up in that world, that I had to write it. At that point, there was no choice. I really had to finish it.
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Khaled Hosseini
Afghanistan's Tumultuous History
I didn't know anything about what it takes to publish a novel. And so as I wrote the novel, and increasingly it looked like I was going to submit it, as unlikely as that seemed initially, I had to learn how books are published. So I went and bought a book called How to Publish Your First Novel, and I learned through that book that you have to find an agent. So then I went and got a book that is called How to Find an Agent. And then I eventually just sent submissions to agents in New York and got connected with a woman named Elaine Koster in New York, who called me, and I had one of the most amazing, surreal phone conversations of my life with her. She called me at my home -- I had absolutely no expectation that anybody would look at this thing, read it, talk to me about it. I fully expected the thing to end up with a slush pile, in a trash bin. She called me and she said, "You're going to publish your first novel. There is no question in my mind about that. The question is: where?" And I was like completely stunned.
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Khaled Hosseini
Afghanistan's Tumultuous History
Khaled Hosseini: I cold-called a bunch of agents through mail. I just sent them three or four chapters with a query letter and a synopsis, and I said, "Look, I'm a doctor working at Kaiser, but I've written this novel. I'm from Afghanistan. Here's a novel, here's a story. Call me if you like it." That was basically the way it worked out. And as I said, I didn't expect anybody to -- in fact, I got rejected more than 30 times before Elaine called me. I still have the manila folders of all of the rejections that I received from agencies. I didn't take it personally, I knew that you have to have a thick skin, that rejection is part of the game. If I'm going to submit, I have to expect that I'm going to get rejected a whole bunch of times, and hopefully somebody will respond, and that is what happened.
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Khaled Hosseini
Afghanistan's Tumultuous History
Khaled Hosseini: I had waves of submission, and I started getting lots of rejections, and I would just kind of stubbornly keep submitting to six, seven agents at a time. And I had a nice little collection of rejections by the time she called me. Most of the rejections were very impersonal: "Your book is not right for us. Thank you." -- which led me to believe that they hadn't read it. Some of them had actually read it, and I remember one rejection was, you know, "We like your book, but we think Afghanistan is passé. We think people don't want to really hear about Afghanistan, they are sick of it, maybe in a few years if you submit it again." And it was at that point that I realized what a subjective industry publishing is, and you can't give up, you can't just let that get you down and you just have to accept that and move on and keep pushing, so I did and found Elaine. She said that, "Your book is going to be a very, very big success, and the publisher said that." So I was all geared up for the book the day it comes out, and then the reality, of course, is that when the book is published, it's just a book in a sea, in an ocean of books. And the odds against it becoming a success are astronomically high. So I feel like for me to be here today speaking to you, and everything that has happened, it's just been a series of really kind of very, very unlikely miracles.
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Ron Howard
Oscar for Best Director
As a young person, a young adult trying to make the transition from sitcom actor to motion picture director, I was getting an awful lot of patronizing kind of pats on the head. And, "Hey, hang in there." And, you know, "In another ten or 15 years, I'm sure somebody will give you a chance to direct." And that's not what I wanted to hear at all. I had a lot of frustration about that, and I earned my way out by making student films myself, by writing, and by getting myself into a position with some leverage by being one of the lead actors on Happy Days . I had something I could sort of trade with.
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Ron Howard
Oscar for Best Director
My first movie was a car chase comedy -- young people on the run -- called Grand Theft Auto . And made for $602,000, but the film made a terrific profit and it got me started. I wrote it with my father, and I had to star in it in order to get to direct it. But that's the last time that I acted in anything that I directed. Well, I actually had to do a scene in the next film that I directed, but I didn't like it and I cut the scene out. And the executives in charge of the project, fortunately, liked the movie well enough that they accepted the fact that I cut myself out of the movie. That was the last time that I acted in anything that I've directed.
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