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Johnnetta Cole
Past President of Spelman College
I was asked to give a speech. It was graduation time. And for this particular high school I said, of course I would. The schedule worked. And I went and I sat, waiting for my turn to speak, when I noticed that we were about to hear a song. And one of the graduating seniors stood, a young man went to the piano, and she began her song, and then she broke down, emotionally overtaken. And the audience clapped and she went back to her seat. I was then introduced to speak. And it hit me that I could not go and give that commencement speech, not at that moment. And so, I went to where the young senior sat and I reached out to her and I took her, literally grabbed her and brought her back to that microphone. I put my arms around her and I said, "You've got to try it again." And the young man looked at me as if to say, "This is a little out there, but I'll go along." He began to play and she sang. She was immediately overtaken again by the emotion. And I held her tightly, helped her sing it, encouraged her classmates to join us, and together we got through that song. I went to the microphone and I said, "Well, young graduates, that is your commencement message."
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Johnnetta Cole
Past President of Spelman College
Margaret Mead once said, "Never doubt the ability of a small group of committed individuals to change the world." It's the only way it ever happens. I think once you believe that, once you believe it really is possible -- to use the most frequently articulated phrase --"to make a difference," then you become an empowered force to do that. Surely, that's what was a part of someone like a Martin Luther King, Jr. He could not have done what he did if he didn't believe in the possibility of change. How could Nelson Mandela have sat for 27 years in prison if he didn't believe in the possibility of change? How could those great sisters, suffragettes that they were, have held on -- until finally in 1920 we women folk got the right to vote -- if they didn't believe that their action could lead to change?
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Francis Collins
Presidential Medal of Freedom
Francis Collins: I think you have to really care about what you're doing, because anything worth doing is going to be challenging and it's going to have a high risk of failure. I have failed more times in my life than I could tell you about. Hunting for disease genes is a very failure-prone process and that's mostly what I've done in my scientific career -- for cystic fibrosis, for Huntington's disease. We're right now hunting for the genes for adult onset diabetes, which is the hardest thing I've ever done and I don't know if it's going to work. I have a sign on my wall which is a quote from Winston Churchill, which says, "Success is nothing more than going from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm."
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Francis Collins
Presidential Medal of Freedom
I don't know any scientists who have a success rate of their experiments greater than about one in ten. Ninety percent, total flops, learn nothing, something was dreadfully wrong, just wasted time. Of the ten percent that actually succeed, maybe ten percent of those actually contribute in some way to new knowledge, and the rest just sort of confirmed something that was already known. So if one is going to do this -- and don't get me wrong, it's the most exhilarating thing in the world to do if you decide that this is your calling -- that one has to expect failure. If you're doing experiments that work all the time, you're not working on anything very interesting. You're not really at the cutting edge, you're just sort of replicating things that were already known.
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Denton Cooley
Pioneer of Heart Transplants
I've always felt that maybe one of the reasons that I did well as a student and made such good grades was because I lacked confidence. Lacked self-confidence, and I never felt that I was prepared to take an examination, and I had to study a little bit extra. So that sort of lack of confidence helped me, I think, to make a good record when I was a student. But since I finished my medical training, and so on, at that level, I've gained self-confidence over a period of years. And had a great deal of experience in everyday surgery.
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Denton Cooley
Pioneer of Heart Transplants
I can remember so well, one day when we lost a patient in the operating room. Lost one of the patients back on the cardiac ward, and so forth, and I was very depressed. I went and talked to Dr. Blalock, and I said we ought to cancel the schedule for the rest of the week, and sort of get ourselves back together. And he said, "No. We didn't do anything wrong. We did our best." He said, "You just go ahead and schedule tomorrow's cases as if nothing had gone wrong." He said, "I think I'm going to go out and play nine holes of golf myself." And that was a good lesson to me, you know. The only way you can get over this discouragement, or sadness, is to keep on working. The human mind has a way of putting some of those things in a distant corner, and you just go ahead with your life, and try to overcome those disappointments.
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