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Benazir Bhutto
Former Prime Minister of Pakistan
Benazir Bhutto: I think the most profound influence in my formative years was the years I spent at Harvard. I went there at a time of great social ferment, at a time when the Vietnam war was being fought. I -- as a nation -- was against the Vietnam war, but I found that my American fellow students were against that war too. So -- and they didn't want to fight the war. They were protesting it and I found that if you didn't like something you could do something about it. It was also a time when Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King and idealism -- Cesar Chavez and the grape boycott from California, labor rights. So I was very much into saving the world. My generation grew up in saving the world. We thought education wasn't important. Exams weren't important, although I still did it because I was scared my father would get cross, but I discovered that life was more than my homework and my tuitions and my tutorial. Life was about the larger issues where we could all play a role.
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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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