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Barry Marshall
Nobel Prize in Medicine
I'd actually worked this out when I was a student in college, that if I went to a lecture and came out of the lecture thinking, "I don't understand that," it was because it was a bad lecture, and the lecturer didn't know his stuff. Because when I had a good teacher, I would always know exactly what he was talking about and I'd never have to refresh it. I would just understand it. And that's actually something that I've taken into my teaching career, is that if I know the subject and know my stuff, I don't have to get nervous about getting up in front of hundreds of people and giving a lecture, and they'll say it was a good lecture. And so, it's the preparation you put into it, and you have to know your stuff to be able to teach it to others.
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Barry Marshall
Nobel Prize in Medicine
One of the things that happened with me is that I was interested in computers, even in 1980 with e-mail, but it was really teletypes in those days. Our library had just got a line to the National Library of Medicine. So I came in and started doing literature searches, because I was interested in computers and it was fun for me. But I started trying to track these bacteria. And I found various, very widespread, dispersed references to things in the stomach, which seemed to be related to the bacteria, going back nearly 100 years. So that we could then develop a hypothesis that these bacteria were causing some problem in the stomach, and maybe that was leading to ulcers. And then, instead of having to do 20 years of research checking out all those different angles, the research was done, but it was never connected up. And so, with the literature searching, as it became available, we were able to pick out the research that was already there and put together this coherent pattern, which linked bacteria and ulcers. It didn't happen overnight. We actually thought about it for two years before we were reasonably confident. It was really quite a few years before we were absolutely water-tight.
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Johnny Mathis
Grammy Hall of Fame
Johnny Mathis: I think the thing that motivated me most musically -- and that's about all I can think of, because my life has been all about music -- the rest of the things I've sort of learned along the way. For instance, how to take care of my body physically, so that I'll be able to sing when I'm required to. That I learned at an early age, because of my athletics in college and high school. So I learned to exercise regularly so that I could be strong physically to support the tones. I was fascinated from a very early age by opera singers. They were the ones that I listened to, and that my teacher Connie Cox played for me ad nauseam. She felt that if I could learn from them the technique of producing the tones properly -- not just producing them, but producing them so that I wouldn't do harm to my vocal cords -- that was the thing that was important to her. And that was the thing that has stood me in good stead all these years.
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Ernst Mayr
The Darwin of the 20th Century
I went to the museum and I met Professor Stresemann, who greatly impressed me, even though I now have reconstructed, he was only 34 years old at the time. He demanded that he could see my daily notebooks of my bird observations, which I kept very carefully and made all sorts of sketches and everything else. Then he asked me questions about birds, one after the other, then he showed me specimens, and that was the hardest part because the specimens in the trays in the museum didn't look at all like the birds in the field. But anyhow when it was all finished, he said, "Well yes, I believe you, and I'm going to publish your observation." And he said, "What you saw was a Red-crested Pochard. That's a Mediterranean duck. Every once in a long while one of them strays across the Alps to Central Europe. The last one that did so before your observation " this was 1923 " the last one before that was in 1846." So it really was a strange thing. So he published it and a little friendship developed between myself and Stresemann, who was much taken by my incredible enthusiasm.
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Ernst Mayr
The Darwin of the 20th Century
I had no experience, of course. I had never shot a bird. I had never skinned a bird. Stresemann was very -- how shall I say -- optimistic about the whole thing, but I got a rush job training in some of these things and I went over to England and I talked it over with Rothschild and his curator about further matters of collecting. And then, the most fortunate thing was that I stopped in Java at the Dutch Colonial Museum, and they had some very experienced native Javanese assistants who had been on expeditions and were even good at bird skinning, and they agreed to lend me three of those to accompany me to New Guinea. In due time, I got to New Guinea and I established camps in various altitudes and in various villages, and collected, and collected, and collected. In due time I learned from these three Javanese whatever there is to be known about life in the jungle and in the mountains and how to make a camp and how to deal with the natives. And I built up rather beautiful collections.
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Ernst Mayr
The Darwin of the 20th Century
About two years ago, three years ago, for maybe the 20th time I went over the whole business of the species concept. What is a species? I looked at the major figures in the evolutionary synthesis, and I looked at Robzhansky and myself, and Huxley and Stebbins, all of us had reasonable species concepts, and the only person that had a species concept that I thought was quite absurd was the paleontologist G.G. Simpson. And then I said to myself, "Well, he can't have been a naturalist in his youth if he had such a peculiar, unworkable species concept." So I went to Simpson's biography and what did I find? I found that in college he was an English major. He had never been a naturalist as a youngster. He never collected anything, and he discovered geology in his senior year in college, and from there he went to stratigraphy and finally to paleontology. Not surprisingly, not having been a naturalist, he has no idea what a species is and he never had. I argued with him about the species concept year after year, but lacking that background, he was unable to see it, and that is the thing. Being a naturalist -- having had that background of being a naturalist -- gives you a view of nature that cannot be acquired just learning from books.
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Ernst Mayr
The Darwin of the 20th Century
One day Jim Watson's parents appeared in my office. They had some other thing to do in New York, no doubt, because they lived in Chicago. They knew I was an ornithologist and I think Jim knew about me and had already acquired a certain admiration for my work. So Ms. Watson asked me, "Jim wants to become an ornithologist. Where should he go for his studies of ornithology?" At that time, of course, everybody went to Cornell. And I said -- probably to their surprise -- I said, "He shouldn't study ornithology at all. He should, in his undergraduate career, get a very good basic training in biology. And when, after four years, he was still keen on ornithology, then I would be willing to suggest where you should go for graduate school in ornithology. Maybe other people said the same thing. I don't credit myself as being the only one who guided his future. Anyhow he did follow just that. He went to a good school -- I think it was the University of Chicago -- got an excellent training in biology, and of course in the course of that he encountered all sorts of interests, all sorts of problems that are far more interesting than bird watching, and so he never followed up his intention to become an ornithologist, but he became the discoverer of the double helix, all through my giving him good advice!
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