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Barry Marshall
Nobel Prize in Medicine
They said, "Dear Dr. Marshall, we're so sorry that we couldn't accept your abstract. It was such a high standard this year, we had 67 applications and we could only accept 64." So mine was in the bottom 10 percent. Looking back at it I can say it was pushing it a bit to try and get it accepted, but it's fun to have the rejection letter after all these years. My boss knew about the conference in Brussels, so he said, "Don't be downhearted, I still think it's good. You go to Belgium." The hospital paid my airfare, and I connected up with some researchers in Belgium, and made phone calls and whatever, and presented it in Belgium, and that's when it sort of hit the news.
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Barry Marshall
Nobel Prize in Medicine
We were persistent. We were reading the literature, and as far as we could tell this was similar to some bacteria that had been grown from mice, spiral bacteria. So we were using the same media and the same atmosphere and sending biopsies down, looking under the microscope for bacteria there. I'd come down to the lab a few days later and I'd say, "Did it grow?" "No, sorry, it didn't grow." So this went for about six months, and then I did some biopsies just before Easter. We have a very long Easter break, a four day holiday, in Australia. Luckily, there's no separation of church and state in Australia, because you wouldn't have had this holiday in the U.S. Anyway, we took biopsies on a Thursday and they were in the incubator Friday and Saturday. The technologist was so busy on Saturday morning, he left the research material there and just looked after the important, human, normal, routine biopsies. So he didn't look at these biopsies from Thursday until Tuesday morning, and then I got a phone call, "Barry, come down to the lab! We think we've grown these bacteria." I came down and I was talking to them and I said, "Why didn't we grow them before?" And they said, "We routinely throw the plates out after two days if nothing is showing up." And of course, helicobacters need at least three -- usually four -- days to show up on the plates.
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Barry Marshall
Nobel Prize in Medicine
We had an experiment that was funded where we would have little baby piglets and we would give them some helicobacter each week. Then, a week later, we would do an endoscopy on them to see if the bacteria were causing any inflation in the stomach. Now piglets grow like you wouldn't believe. In the Midwest, people know how quickly they grow. So after three months of this experiment, I had 70-pound pigs that I was wrestling each week trying to do an endoscopy on, and it was a big mess, and the bacteria didn't take. Whenever I presented my work, the skeptics would get up and say, "Well, Dr. Marshall, that's all very nice, but let's face it. You know, people with ulcers have got such a disturbed physiology in their stomach, and these bacteria are so common, that they must just be harmless, and they're just colonizing the people with the ulcers." So I had to prove that the bacteria could infect a normal, healthy animal, cause the disease. Then I had to fish the bacteria up afterwards.
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Ernst Mayr
The Darwin of the 20th Century
I am at the present time -- and even more so, let's say, 20 years ago -- rather aggressively assertive, and that is due to the fact that, in many ways, all through my early life I was sort of a neglected entity. Now to begin with, I was the middle one of three brothers and in my family, unknowingly, the family always had some preferential things for the oldest one and some preferential treatment for the youngest one, but there was no special preferential treatment in any respect for the middle one, and I resented it. And then I moved around in school a good deal. I first was in Bavaria, in Munich, and then moved to Dresden where they speak a totally different dialect, and I was placed in the seating order as the last one and gradually integrated into the class, and I always had to fight for my existence so to speak. Then in the university I realized that biologists -- zoologists in my case -- really were not considered as highly as the physicists and mathematicians, and again I had to assert myself. And then of course, when I came to America in 1931, I was a German, and Germany at that time was not in very high regard, and in 1933 Hitler came to power and it got even worse, and again I was sort of silently -- unknowingly perhaps -- discriminated against. And then of course, I was a museum person, and at the minute I was branching out into fields like evolutionary biology, history of biology, philosophy of biology. At the beginning, I was a museum man and they didn't have a very high reputation. I wasn't a professor. I wasn't teaching anywhere. And again and again when it came to awarding honors in those days -- now I get more honors than I need -- but I didn't get the honors because I was only a museum person, you see. The result was that I tended to very aggressively defend my views and all that, because if I didn't I would have been ignored.
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Willie Mays
Baseball Hall of Fame
I was the first black in that particular league. And, we played in a town called Hagerstown, Maryland. I'll never forget this day, on a Friday. And, they call you all kind of names there, "nigger" this, and "nigger" that. I said to myself -- and this is why Piper Davis came in -- in my mind, "Hey, whatever they call you, they can't touch you. Don't talk back." Now this was on a Friday. And the Friday night I hit two doubles and a home run; they never clapped. The next day I hit the same thing. There was a house out there in the back there, I hit that twice. Now they started clapping a little bit. You know how that is, you know, they clapped a little bit. By Sunday there was a big headline in the paper: "Do Not Bother Mays." You understand what I'm saying? They call you all kinds of names. Now this is the first two games I played. By Sunday, I come to bat, they're all clapping. And I'm wondering, wait a minute, what happened to the Friday, what happened to the Saturday?
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Willie Mays
Baseball Hall of Fame
When I came back in 1951, I didn't start in New York, I started in Philadelphia. Friday, Saturday and Sunday, that was my first game. I think I went 0 for 12, or 0 for 13, or whatever, and I'm really, really worried because in the minors I'm hitting .477, killing everybody. And I came to the majors, I couldn't hit. I was playing the outfield very, very well, throwing out everybody, but I just couldn't get a hit. I didn't strike out a lot. And I started crying, and Leo came to me and he says, "You're my center fielder; it doesn't make any difference what you do. You just go home, come back and play tomorrow." I think that really, really turned me around because the next day I hit a home run off of Spahn for my first hit. And, then I went another ten games, another ten at bat without getting a hit, and then I blossomed up right quick.
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