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Elizabeth Blackburn
Nobel Prize in Medicine
Elizabeth Blackburn: I was trained with somebody called Fred Sanger, who won a Nobel Prize, first for sequencing proteins, and he was working on the sequencing of nucleic acids, DNA and RNA, but then DNA when I was a Ph.D. student with him. And so there was very few ways of sequencing DNA then, and one of the things you could do was sequence DNA at the very ends of the long DNA molecules that make up genomes, and so I saw that there would be a feasibility, a way of looking at the ends of DNA, whereas perhaps in those days you couldn't look at the middle of DNA so well. And I went to Joe Gall's lab, and was interested in pursuing this, and Joe Gall, who I mentioned before was a really good mentor, is also an extremely good biologist in recognizing there are good biological systems for asking certain questions. And he was the one who said, "There is this system that has very small short chromosomes," and lots of them, meaning lots of ends, so that this would be something that -- you know, this would be a system. And I was excited because I wanted to look at the ends of things, the ends of DNA, which nobody really had been able to look at in eukaryotes, organisms like us that had nuclei in their cells. And so it was partly that it was doable, and partly because there was a good system to do it in.
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Norman Borlaug
Ending World Hunger
Norman Borlaug: Well, in my mind, I always said, why is it that -- by then we'd done testing with the old Minnesota, Montana and Canadian spring wheats -- Why is it that those things you can't bring down? Because we had the yield test with them included, comparing to the new ones. You can't bring them where the day length is 38 degrees or less, because they're the lowest yielding wheats when that happens, and yet here are the crosses that came from this. I had been forced by rust to make a second group to avoid a rust epidemic in Mexico. The first ones were Yaqui times -- or I should say Marquis times -- Newthatch from Minnesota. The second one was Mentana, an Italian wheat crossed to Kenya that had rust resistance. And combining those, this new rust didn't cause us any trouble.
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Norman Borlaug
Ending World Hunger
Norman Borlaug: At that time the criticism of Pakistan and India, especially, they said, "With this mound of people, there's no hope. They've got to die off to a fraction of the population of today." And I had seen enough on these tests that my trainees had run in many countries. Do not accept that. But there's behind the scene, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation, both of them together had decided that the breakthrough in production should come in India. The need was the greatest and it was to be built on not wheat, but on sorghum and millet and cassava. But then the Mexican wheats got into the picture and screwed all of that up.
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Norman Borlaug
Ending World Hunger
I say that the only way that the world can keep up with food production to the levels that are needed with a growing world population, is by the improvement of science and technology, and with the right policies that permit the application of that science and technology. And that includes availability of the improved seeds, fertilizer -- how much of each kind of nutrient -- and the control of weeds, which is very important, and then, finally, this whole question of credit and policy on pricing. All of those have to be part of the package.
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J. Carter Brown
Director Emeritus
National Gallery of Art
J. Carter Brown: I didn't know what channel I would follow to carry out this idea of cultural administration. But, it was very simple. I didn't have enough talent to do any one thing superbly well. I couldn't draw. I wasn't that musical, although I've sung all my life in choruses. I wasn't that good an actor. I didn't do math, and didn't do the visual expression that it would take to be an architect, although I loved architecture. And, I wasn't going to be a poet. And, I wanted to achieve, so I figured the solution is to combine something so you can get a niche that other people haven't got. So, I would go into the arts from an academic point of view, and I'd combine that with a business school degree. And then, I could market myself as a kind of cultural administrator, a kind of midwife for culture, and someone to arc the connection between an audience and the work of art, or of the arts. And so, that was a career objective that I carved out for myself as a kid.
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J. Carter Brown
Director Emeritus
National Gallery of Art
I was driving from the station in Washington, home to Georgetown. My father was working in the government, and I think I must have been 12 years old. I remember it was raining. We passed the National Gallery, and it was -- that wonderful pink marble in the rain it gets very rich rose, and I remember looking up and saying to my parents, "That's the kind of job I would like to have some day." Now, little did I know that I would actually be Director of that museum. But I felt that institutions had the stability to bring the arts to people, and perhaps art museums were the most stable because theater companies come and go, and there's a lot of risk in the various performing arts and it's sort of ephemeral. But, there's something wonderfully permanent about those collections in art museums, and then you can use that as a base to bring in other art forms.
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