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Judah Folkman
Cancer Research
Judah Folkman: In high school, there were a number of outstanding teachers, but two were really critical. One was a teacher who taught geometry and solid geometry. John Schott his name was. And he would allow you to solve problems. So you'd get the problem solved, like in the book. Then he would say to some of the students, "Can you do it another way?" And we always thought there was only one way to solve a problem. He said, "No, try it another way." And then when you'd get it that way, he would say, "Can you do it another way?" And then you began to learn that there were a whole series of ways to solve the same problem but the book only had one way. And he would say, "Can you make a model of it." So instead of drawing a graph, he would say, "Can you make a three-dimensional model." And he had all kinds of pieces of tools and things around in his geometry class. And so it was extremely interesting, because he made you solve problems that weren't written anywhere. So then I first got the idea you could do that.
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Judah Folkman
Cancer Research
There was another member of the congregation who worked in a varnish factory. He was the chemist, the analytical chemist for a varnish factory, and he said -- this was in high school -- "If you have time on Thursday afternoons, if you could, want to come by?" And then in the summer -- so in the summer I worked for him, and measuring mixed ratios of solvents to paint and everything, and he was always doing the quality control. But he had a big chemistry lab. And so I learned a lot from him about what chemistry was like on a practical way, and how you had to be very careful about the numbers. So you did a little experiment on a bench, but if you were off three decimal places and it went to a 100,000 gallon production, the company'd go bankrupt. So he said, "What I'm doing is very important. The decimal places are important." So that was a good lesson about accuracy.
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Judah Folkman
Cancer Research
In high school, I began to work just briefly, in the hospital, first in the clinical labs, but then as an orderly in the operating room, to see if I wanted to be a surgeon. And so while I was doing that in about junior year in high school, the Chief of Surgery at Columbus, the University Hospital, Robert Zollinger, a very famous surgeon, stopped me, and he knew the family, and he knew me. He said, "You're wasting your time doing this. If you want to be a surgeon, why don't you go to school at Ohio State and come and work in my surgical laboratory where they're training surgical residents on operations on dogs." That's a standard, that was the standard. "And you can work in the afternoon and help them." And his idea was that he'd always been looking for somebody who knew that they want to be a surgeon, very early. He felt that surgeons should, like violinists and pianists and dancers, start early, instead of waiting till 25 years old. And he said you can learn the anatomy later; do the skills.
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Shelby Foote
Novelist and Historian
I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of -- I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry. I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose. But I haven't known a single writer who didn't start out trying to write poetry. William Faulkner always called himself a failed poet.
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Shelby Foote
Novelist and Historian
If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing. Now, there are good writers who do not feel that way about it. Flannery O'Connor for instance. She went to writing classes and learned a great deal from them. You can't really make rules about writers any more than -- they're as different as -- you can't talk about chairs. There are so many different kinds of chairs, and there are as many different kinds of writers as there are chairs.
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Shelby Foote
Novelist and Historian
I was never a trained historian, three by five cards and all that business. So that I would remember - -I would be writing about something like the third day at Gettysburg, and it was something I couldn't remember the exact quote of, and I of course wanted to look it up and get it accurate, but I couldn't remember except that it was in a book with a red binding, and it was on the left-hand side on the top third of the page. So I would go to the shelf and pull down every red-bound book and look through it, and I would come across things like -- I'd say, "My God, I never noticed that before," and it had nothing to do with Gettysburg or anything else, but it would go into the book later in some other way.
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Milton Friedman
Nobel Prize in Economics
Outside of my parents and my wife, there is nobody else who had as much influence on my life as Arthur Burns did. And as I say, that major source of influence started exerting itself during a course I took in which there were only two students and he. And this course consisted -- I don't know what it was supposed to be -- but it consisted in going over the draft of his doctoral dissertation sentence by sentence, and trying to find mistakes in it, and analyze it and improve it and criticize it. And as I say, I can think of but one other course in my life that had as much value to me as that course. Because it supplied standards of workmanship, the level of accuracy you want to aim at, the openness to criticism. Those are the kinds of things it provided.
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