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Robert Strauss
Presidential Medal of Freedom
Robert Strauss: My mother was the major inspiration in my life, not my father. I got along with him well, but he was not very strong. My mother was strong and kind, and I guess we never had a cross word. She used to worry that I was studying too much, and my father used to say, "Good God Almighty! How can you say he's studying too much? He never does anything but run around, and he makes terrible grades, and you tell him not to study so much." And her answer would be, "Well, you know, if he starts worrying about his grades, he'll get an ulcer, and I don't want him to lose his health. He's got such a long life ahead of him, and he's going into politics and diplomacy." So she had already begun to carve out -- that's the inspiration I had. Instead of a teacher, it was my mother.
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Robert Strauss
Presidential Medal of Freedom
I came from a Jewish family, and my parents lived, as I said, in West Texas, and I had a grandmother who lived in Forth Worth, and on one of the high holidays in the fall, the family would all come to Fort Worth, and we would spend a day or so with my grandmother, who came from Germany and who was very German -- in fact, we called her grossmama not "grandmother." But when they would gather around there, my mother would always say, "My son Bobby is going to be a diplomat, and he's going into politics, and he'll be the first Jewish Governor of the State of Texas." I can remember being 14 years old, 12, 13 years old maybe, in that age, and walking into the room, and one of my uncles would say, "Well, here comes the Governor," and they would all laugh, and I could have killed the sonofabitches. But my mother ignored them totally. She would just smile. And she wasn't far wrong; I had a successful political career.
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John Sulston
Nobel Prize in Medicine
We need to find a new way of conducting ethics. But I don't think this can be done just on the level of the individual scientist. After all, we're all people. We get hired to do this or that. We, after all, owe a duty of delivery to our bosses, our funders. So you cannot leave it to the individual to decide whether or not an application is ethical. This must be done in a societal way, a democratic way. What it means in practice is that we should have good, constantly evolving, thought-out regulations about how we handle biological products. About how we produce drugs, which drugs we produce, how we deliver the drugs. In the case of my own field, I'm thinking, the practical output is healthcare, and I think we should be heading towards universal healthcare as fast as we can. We're not doing that at the moment. We're fighting all the time. We're putting most of our resources into more drugs for the rich countries and none at all for the poor. The so-called "neglected disease" problem. The fact that 90 percent of the world's disease burden receives only 10 percent of the research effort. That's simply, to me, ethically unacceptable. But no individual can do anything about it. All we can do is to feed into the democratic process and say, "Look, we just have to fix the world differently," and all scientists will actually agree, so long as they're given the opportunity to join in.
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Hilary Swank
Two Oscars for Best Actress
As a child, I felt like an outsider, and that's not just specific to me. I think everyone has felt like that at one point or another in their life, but for me, I would read books and watch movies, and in that way, I would feel understood. I felt like characters were going through something I was going through, or that would make me feel, "Oh, there's someone in the world that is understanding," and they almost became like they were my friends. And when I realized that it was something I could do with my life -- that I could become an actor and tell these stories, that I could continue to learn about myself in a deeper way, that I could entertain at the same time, and hopefully give that to another child or person and just continue to learn about the human experience -- it was really my draw to become an actor and how I describe what movies are.
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