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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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Khaled Hosseini
Afghanistan’s Tumultuous History
Khaled Hosseini: I was a very serious student in school. My parents were both -- they weren't intensely involved with our studies, but they were involved in a very global fashion in the sense that they told us that education is really important, you have to do your homework, you have to study and you have to do well. And those were the principles in the house. That was our job, to study and do well. So I was a good student, all of my siblings were good students. We were all pretty sensible kids. Homework and school always came first. And so I did well when I was in school in Kabul in all of my subjects, and those were kind of a lesson and principles that served me well when I came over to the U.S. in 1980. I had already developed the habits of being a good student and being very diligent, and so I did very well in high school here and through college and so on. So I always was a pretty good student.
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Khaled Hosseini
Afghanistan’s Tumultuous History
Khaled Hosseini: I don't want to say that I was an exceptionally observant child, but I think to some level, I must have been. I must have had some sense of awareness about my life and some ability to put it in context for myself. Because I remember when I was a kid in Kabul writing stories, and all those stories, now that I think about them, and I don't remember them all, but I remember some of them, had this idea of social class. They had this theme of the clash between the different social classes and the kind of inequities that exist in the world. Because when you grow up in a Third World country, you know, poverty and affluence are juxtaposed. It's literally next door -- you don't have to go to another zip code. It's right there when you walk out in the street, and there are beggars and so on and so forth. So it becomes part of your life, and you can either not, just not reflect on it, but I must have, because I remember my stories always had to do with these things. There was always some guy who came from a very affluent background and some person who came from a much less privileged background, and their lives collided in some way, and tragedy would ensue inevitably. I mean, sort of a recurring theme in my stories, and The Kite Runner is very similar to that. So I think I must have had that, and maybe you call it guilt or it's quite possibly that.
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Khaled Hosseini
Afghanistan’s Tumultuous History
So I use the first draft purely as a frame on which to build the actual story. So a lot of my writing is done through rewriting. And I don't become discouraged by the notion that my first draft is not going to win any prizes or that it's not going to be -- I understand that it's going to be lousy, but I want all of the essential elements to be there. The heart of the story has to be in that first draft, and then I can use that to create something and discover things about the story. When I wrote, for instance, The Kite Runner, there were a lot of things in that first draft that stayed, but some things in that first draft were tossed, and the transformation in some passages were very dramatic. I wrote an entire draft where the two kids were not brothers, and it really wasn't until a subsequent draft when I realized that the kids, suddenly the idea came -- well, what if the kids are brothers, and that changed the whole tone of the story. And when I rewrote it, writing it with that knowledge, it changed everything. And so you can get discouraged. Writing is largely about rewriting, and I abhor writing the first draft. I love writing subsequent drafts because that's when I can see the story getting closer and closer to what I intended and what my original hopes for it were.
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