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John Hennessy
President of Stanford University
At a young age, I remember my parents bought me a set of encyclopedias, and I started reading them. Now you think reading encyclopedias is not terribly inspiring, but I found it tremendously interesting, and that really laid a broad foundation for knowledge across a wide variety of fields, and that's something I've always enjoyed. I've enjoyed having some insight and some understanding, not just about my own field but about lots of fields, and talking to scholars and people who work in a variety of fields. Today, it's still one of the things I most enjoy, is getting out and talking to the faculty at Stanford about the work they're doing in everything from medicine to English to economics. It's one thing I've found enjoyable, and maybe reading encyclopedias set the foundation for doing that.
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John Hennessy
President of Stanford University
I started out in electrical engineering, but then I had the opportunity to get more involved in computing, and two things happened that really shaped my life. One was I had the opportunity to be an assistant in a programming course after I had completed the course, and that really kindled my love for teaching and working with other students, and helping them understand what was wrong with their programs and how to make the software they were writing work properly. The other thing that happened is I had the opportunity to work on a research project with a faculty member to build a computer, and that really kindled my interest for being involved in research and working on things in that direction. And about my junior year, I decided that I wanted to pursue graduate work in computer science and that I wanted to go on for a Ph.D. So the first thing I had to do, here was an electrical engineer whose math background was completely in calculus and differential equations -- which it would be for an electrical engineer -- who wanted to go on to a computer science degree and had no discrete math, no logic. So I turned around and jumped into a junior level math major course without the prerequisites, which was a startling experience for me. I had never worked so hard in my life. All of a sudden I was working very hard, because I was now jumping into a different field, but I really enjoyed it. That convinced me that I wanted to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science, and I started off in that direction.
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John Hennessy
President of Stanford University
The years I spent as a regular faculty member working with students, teaching, working with my research, have absolutely been the happiest years of my life. I really enjoyed that, and enjoyed that engagement with students and colleagues. What really helped me make this decision, and agree to take on this job, was the fact that when you've been at an institution for 20 years, your loyalty to the institution, and your devotion to it, really grows, and your willingness to help the institution out. Clearly, for an engineer to jump into the provost's job, let alone the president's job, was a major leap. It meant that I had to be comfortable talking to colleagues across the entire institution, from the law school to the business school to the medical school.
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John Hennessy
President of Stanford University
One of the things we did was to build a bridge to the medical school, to engage in a new program we had been building at Stanford called "Bio-X." That's an interdisciplinary program based on the biological sciences but bringing together not only biology, biochemistry, genetics, and the engineering disciplines as well: electrical engineering, computer science, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering. That gave me the feeling that I could work across those boundaries. I could interact with colleagues on a broader front, across the university, and it gave me some confidence, together with the experience that I had had from the industrial world, that I could really take this leap of faith and try this new challenge, which it certainly is a new challenge. I think I found that every time you rise to a new challenge, if you can bring to that challenge, and think about how all the experiences you've had along the way -- from being a junior faculty member, your first encounter teaching students, and how nervous you are the first time you walk into a classroom, and how you manage to overcome that, to your research, to spending time in industry -- and learn from all those things and bring them all to bear, I think it gives you some confidence that you can deal with a variety of new situations which you encounter in the provost office or the president's office.
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Sir Edmund Hillary
Conqueror of Mt. Everest
Sir Edmund Hillary: The press and the public have created an image of Ed Hillary, hero and explorer which simply doesn't exist. They've painted a picture of me as a heroic type, full of enormous courage, tremendous strength, undying enthusiasm and all the rest of it. But it's all really just a story, that's been written up in the newspapers. I'm a person, as I've said, of modest abilities, with a good deal of determination, and I do quite a lot of planning ahead. With careful planning and good motivation, I think you can often achieve things that other much more talented people would probably do much more easily. But then, a lot of these very talented people are not strongly motivated to carry out the things that I've been involved in.
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Sir Edmund Hillary
Conqueror of Mt. Everest
If I'm selecting a group, the first thing one has to look for is a record of achievement. It may be modest achievement, but people have shown that they can persist, they can carry out objectives and get to a final solution. If they can do that on small things, there's a very good chance that they'll perform well on big things at the same time. Then, I'm a great believer in a really good sense of humor. If you have someone in an expedition who's reasonably competent and has a great sense of humor, they're a very stimulating factor for the whole team, and they play a very important psychological part, I think in the success of the team.
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Sir Edmund Hillary
Conqueror of Mt. Everest
But, I recommend to younger people that it's foolish to start from scratch again. Older people really have a lot of experience. They have a lot of knowledge. Some of them are even quite pleasant people, and I recommend to the young ones to take advantage of all that previous experience and knowledge and understanding which older people have. Absorb it all, and then drop the old people if you'd like, and go off and do your own thing. At least you're starting with all that built-up accumulation of knowledge and understanding that's been going on for generations. I think this is a very valuable thing that young people can do. Quite often a young person who is unhappy and uncertain, can make friendships with some slightly older people with more experience and maybe learn a little bit from them and get a little bit more certain in themselves. Now I know a lot of youngsters couldn't care less about this, but that's what I would recommend to a lot of them. I actually learned a lot from older people when I was in my 20s. What little I did learn was mostly from older people, not from young ones.
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David Ho
AIDS Research Pioneer
I was at the right place at the right time, having just finished the right type of training, getting ready to do the right type of training that would be relevant to this problem. Chance does play a very, very important role. The other thing I've been telling some of the students here is that serendipity plays an important role, but we have to be prepared to take advantage of the opportunities that are bubbled up by serendipity. And, I certainly, for this particular problem, once I grabbed onto it I did not let go, even though in the early years it was not a problem and people would say, "Well why are you interested in a problem that effects the gay men and drug users?" You know, it's a disease and one should not look upon it in that way. And so, I went full speed ahead on this particular problem.
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David Ho
AIDS Research Pioneer
A lot of what we're looking at is the result of that process from our lab as well as the laboratories of several groups around the world, basically realizing the kinetics of the virus, using that information to do calculations. And, this is where my physical science background really came in useful, having a strong background in mathematics and applying it to biology and then being able to go on with a hypothesis, saying that if we approach treatment in this fashion with these types of drugs in combination, these are the results we expect. And, most of that has come true over the last few years, and now we need to see how far we could go with this whole strategy.
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