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Keith Black
Pioneering Neurosurgeon
Keith Black: In addition to just having the grades and the test scores, I had demonstrated an aptitude really for research and science early on. When I was with my father one summer at the University of Pennsylvania, I would hang around the research labs at the University of Pennsylvania, which led me ultimately to try to seek out a position in a research lab when I went back to Cleveland, which I actually had an opportunity to start in the tenth grade. So I was doing research at one of the hospitals -- St. Luke's Hospital in Cleveland -- in tenth and eleventh grade, and essentially spent half of my twelfth grade year doing research in a surgical research lab, and published my first paper when I was 17 years old. So you know, I had demonstrated really a focus on science and research, which I think made me competitive for the program.
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Keith Black
Pioneering Neurosurgeon
If you want to do something, one of the smartest things that you can do is go find someone that's done it and to try to get them to show you how they did it, to show you where the potholes are. What are the right steps to get there? If you want to be an NBA basketball star, go try to find people that are stars, and to try to get them to become your mentors. If you want to become a brain surgeon, go find a brain surgeon or brain surgeons, and to try to have them be your mentor. And not just in terms of where to go to school, but what are the things that are really tough that you have to overcome, and how did you overcome it. Just having the drive and the discipline and the focus to not take no for an answer.
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Elizabeth Blackburn
Nobel Prize in Medicine
As soon as I started looking at the molecular behavior, there was something unusual about the way the DNA was behaving, and then subsequent experiments by us and by others, over the next few years said, "Ah, there's something going on here which is different." So now, why are they important? So now, fast forwarding and jump ahead now to much more what we know. We know that the genetic material is in long thread-like molecules, DNA molecules, and they have -- each DNA molecule has two ends, and the ends have to be protected. Otherwise they kind of chemically fray away every time the cells multiply. So it turned out to be particularly important to cells that they protect the ends, and furthermore that they replenish the ends of DNA. It was that replenishment that was going on and giving rise to the strange behavior of the DNA that made us first suspicious. And then Carol and I then, you know, we'll look for telomerase. So we didn't stumble over telomerase. It was something that, there was some reason to think might exist, but it would take some real digging to get it.
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Elizabeth Blackburn
Nobel Prize in Medicine
One thing teaching makes you very, very clearly aware of is, if you don't really understand something, and think about it, you will never be able to teach it. So particularly starting at Berkeley, where I really had to learn how to teach undergraduates pretty early on, and that took a lot of work. That was a fairly daunting thing to have to teach undergraduates at Berkeley, without any kind of real training for it, and I remember feeling pretty under pressure while I was doing that. But it was worth going through that kind of crucible, because it was something that taught me a whole lot, and I learned the hard way. I have to say, I made a lot of mistakes in how I went about it. The poor students had to put up with a lot, but I realize that it is so important that if you teach, then it means that you've understood it, and then you've cleared your brain, and you've forced your brain to think about it, and that's really good.
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J. Carter Brown
Director Emeritus
National Gallery of Art
I did not major in history of art as an undergraduate, and that was on purpose, on the advice of a hero of mine, the former Director of the Metropolitan Museum, Francis Henry Taylor, who was just one of the most charismatic people. And, I went to see him and ask his advice about preparing for a museum career. So he said, "Well first of all, don't major in fine arts." I said, "What?" He said, "You'll be doing that for the rest of your life. You'll have to go to graduate school, you'll be deep into it. Get a broad cultural background, so that what you do after that all has meaning." And so, I majored in history and literature, which Harvard offered to a small percentage of the class, and which was a wonderful field. And, I took some art history courses, but very little. I really got my art history aboard later.
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J. Carter Brown
Director Emeritus
National Gallery of Art
Europe, you know, every few feet there is some extraordinary visual or cultural experience. My mentor, Francis Taylor, said, "You've got to go to Europe and wash your eyeballs in the stuff." And it's true. He had this great phrase, he said, "A museum is a gymnasium for the eye. The stuff," he said, "that's in America has been filtered through dealers. It's only what's movable, what's fashionable at the time. In Europe you get things that are painted on the walls and they're not going to move, and you've really got to expose yourself to that." And now, of course, we have this global outlook that's important, because there's Asia to see. No one will understand a Japanese garden until you've walked through one, and you hear the crunch underfoot, and you smell it, and you experience it over time. Now, there's no photograph or any movie that can give you that experience.
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J. Carter Brown
Director Emeritus
National Gallery of Art
J. Carter Brown: I was immensely prepared. I was eleven years in studying after getting out of high school. I had a year in Europe studying with Bernard Berenson, and traveling, and learning German, and going to the Louvre Museum school, and later the Hague Art History Bureau. And, I had both the business school and this very rigorous master's at NYU Institute of Fine Arts, with this Germanic thoroughness, two-and-a-half years with a full-blown thesis, comprehensive exams in the whole history of art, and two language exams. And so, yes - and I'd had this fabulous opportunity growing up of exposure - but I'm interested in the inscription that is carved, apparently, over the lintel, the entrance of the institute founded by Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin: "Fortune smiles on those prepared to receive it." And, you know, the Bermuda Race in yacht racing, my father called it "the great Atlantic lottery," because where the Gulf Stream is, and what the weather is, is so fraught with accidental eventualities. And yet, when we were doing it, Carlton Mitchell won it three years in a row. And so, you know, there must be more to it than just luck.
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J. Carter Brown
Director Emeritus
National Gallery of Art
In France the word for "curator" and for "conservative" is the same word. And, people like to do things the way they always were done. That's where my Harvard Business School training came in. One of the first things I did when I became Director was get rid of the desk that my predecessor had, which was this huge big desk with a high-back chair. And this little rickety chair by the side, for anyone who came to see him would come and sit straight up, sort of like a serf handling his cap. And, I got rid of all that. I got the (I.M.) Pei office to design a totally modernist interior, even when we were still in the West Building, and substituted a round table with five equal chairs that were swivel chairs. What it telegraphed was that we were all there equally to solve the problem, whatever it was, which was somewhere in the middle of the table. And, everybody could contribute and everybody, by the end of it, should buy in. And, this was just a very different management style, but it seemed to work.
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