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Twyla Tharp
Dancer and Choreographer
Twyla Tharp: When I'm in the studio, when I'm warm, when I'm what people call improvising, but what I call futzing because improvisation seems like such a somehow institutionalized word. What I do is completely the opposite of institutionalized, it's the messiest thing you can imagine. That when I'm in a certain state where the cerebral powers are turned off, and the body just goes according to directive that I know not of, it's at those times that I feel a very special connection to I feel the most right. I don't want to become too mystic about this, but things feel as though they're in the best order at that particular moment. It's a short period. It goes only, at maximum, an hour. I pay a very great price to be able to maintain that. But it is, that hour that -- I use the same phrase over and over again -- that tells me who I am. I think it's that way for anyone who does anything that is personal to them. There are moments where things come, and they don't know where they've come from. It's the business of discovery, and being able to have that freshness in your daily procedure that enrichens the life. It keeps the discipline that's necessary for any artist from becoming stale.
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Twyla Tharp
Dancer and Choreographer
Twyla Tharp: I not only have a very intimate connection with rhythm because of I'm sure that children who are fortunate enough to have professional parents -- or parents who introduce them at a very young and emotional age to a calling that becomes their profession and their chosen passion, which seems like a contradiction in terms but is not -- have an advantage over all others. The fact that my mother held me before I could really walk, and I was dealing with music, embeds it in a way that is otherwise just not possible. That very, very early training, so that rhythmically I have a sense of it. Aurally I have a sense of it. It's connected to smell, it's connected to taste. It's not a dry thing. It has a great deal of living force to it.
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Wayne Thiebaud
Painter and Teacher
It was somehow important to me to be honest in what we do, and to love what it is we paint. These were lessons given to me by other artists, obviously. To do what you love, or are interested in, or have some regard for. And it seems to me that it's easy to overlook what we spend our majority of time doing, and that's an intimate association with everyday things: putting on our shoes, tying our ties, eating our breakfast, cooking our meals, washing our dishes. Somehow that ongoing human activity seems to me very much worth doing. It's only when we become presumptive, I think -- to think we're better than that, and we'd like to be, and should think of ourselves being better -- that we begin to ignore those things. But in a wonderful way, children really remind us of it. They go to the gumball machines with their little penny and put it in and say, "Look, Dad!" Look what came out of this terrible-looking thing, this magenta sweet little whirl of wonder. And that, to me, is as good as we get.
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Wayne Thiebaud
Painter and Teacher
Wayne Thiebaud: I'm one sort of against mysteriousness about painting. But it's there somewhere. But when you think about it, painting itself is a kind of miracle, because what you're doing is reducing a three-dimensional world of living, active organized chaos into this little, flat, unmoving, quiet, flat thing, which has to, in some ways, be able to speak to you.
Interviewer: So in a way you can never perfectly reach that?
Wayne Thiebaud: I don't think so. I don't think perfection is a very interesting thing, because we are all imperfect. And that's quite wonderful, because it's what we call human.
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James Thomson
Father of Stem Cell Research
James Thomson: It's going to be a pervasive tool that anybody that's interested in the human body and human medicine is going to use. And they won't call them "stem cell biologists" anymore, it'd just be a tool they happen to use, as many other tools. And I think that's going to change human medicine a lot more than this transplantation, because for Parkinson's, for example, there are people that think that transplanting dopaminergic neurons -- that's the neuron that dies in Parkinson's -- will treat or cure that disease. I hope they're right, but there's a good chance that's going to be very hard. Nonetheless, this is the first time we had those neurons in our hands. And it means that we can finally figure out why they're dying. And if you understand why they're dying in the first place, then you shouldn't have to do something as crude as transplanting cells back into the human brain. Hopefully, something like a small molecule will arrest the progression of the disease once we understand the mechanism. So while I'm skeptical whether transplantation will happen anytime soon, I'm not at all skeptical that over my scientific career, we'll have a much better treatment for Parkinson's based on using these cells to understand the biology of those cells. I think that's true about the human body as a whole, is that in some cases, transplantation will work. But for the most cases, you don't want to do that in the first place. You want to make it so you don't have to do the transplant.
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James Thomson
Father of Stem Cell Research
As an undergraduate, one of the places I went was to Woods Hole, and there was a lecture by a conservation biologist named Paul Ehrlich. He talked about captive breeding efforts in zoos. This was about 1980, I think, something like that. And he first dismissed it as being useless, because you need a certain number of individuals to maintain a genetic population. You can quibble about what that number is, but it's a pretty sizeable number. And if you look at the large vertebrates in the world, and you filled up the zoos with that number, you wouldn't cover very many species. I was sitting in the audience, having been just a physics biology person, and not knowing anything practical I thought that environmental people could actually freeze embryos and freeze semen. I didn't know much about that. And that very night, I went back to the house I was living at, and Walter Cronkite was doing an interview at the San Diego Zoo. And there was a woman named Barbara Durrant, with a rat in her hands who had come from a frozen embryo. It was like, "Oh, I was right! You can do that." And it was within the next couple days that I decided that having a veterinary degree would be useful to do that. And ultimately, at the end of vet school, I spent some time at the San Diego Zoo with that particular person. So that's where it dated from. It was this idea that I was interested in field work and also wanted to do some basic science in the lab and trying to bring them together in some way.
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