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Sir Edmund Hillary
Conqueror of Mt. Everest
When I was very young I read about it, dreamed about it and when the opportunity came to do something about it I seemed to slip into it rather easily. Even the companionship that I made with similar friends in adventurous activities, I found very, very rewarding. Nothing is better fun that sitting down with a group of your peers who've done similar sort of things and just talking about your experiences. Maybe boasting a little bit here and there too, but sharing experiences that you all appreciate, you all know have been frightening and dangerous and have been successful.
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Sir Edmund Hillary
Conqueror of Mt. Everest
Sir Edmund Hillary: I did have -- definitely -- one heroic figure who impressed me very much indeed, and that was the great Antarctic explorer, Shackleton. Shackleton I always admired because he was a tough man and a very good leader. And whenever he was in difficult circumstances, which he frequently was, he seemed to have the great ability to inspire his men and lead his party safely out of those conditions. So certainly Shackleton, I would have said, more than anything, was a role model for me. And later on, when I was down in the Antarctic myself and doing various adventures, I really felt that I tried to behave perhaps a little bit more like Shackleton, than any of the other famous Antarctic explorers.
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David Ho
AIDS Research Pioneer
There had been an old dogma in the field that HIV comes in and after this acute phase that looks like flu, there's a prolonged dormancy. The virus wasn't doing much and the person is pretty well. And, we know that because we now know that period could be about ten years. And, somehow we realized that during this period the person's immune system is gradually dwindling and I didn't necessarily like the notion that -- we knew the patient is well -- but I didn't necessarily like the notion that the virus is dormant. And, for a long period of time my research effort is to measure the virus, to quantify the virus. I would say that's a decade long effort, having been one of the first to measure how much virus there is, and then very gradually demonstrating that the old notion is incorrect.
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David Ho
AIDS Research Pioneer
The protease structure had been studied for a long time. Particularly in the late '80s we realized what it looked like three dimensionally, and there's a cavity in the middle. And inside that cavity are the enzymatic sites, or the cutting sites. And so, the big proteins could come and sit in this groove and then be cut. Well it was easy to think that if you could fill that cavity with a small chemical so the proteins could not be cut. And so many, many groups started to try to fill that cavity with small chemicals, and there were rationally designed chemicals -- as well as chemicals that were done by a more empirical screening process -- that would fill this cavity. And so, what protease inhibitors are is simply something that would gum up the chemicals. So now HIV could not cut its proteins, and so it makes that progeny, and therefore it can't spread the infection. As long as the patient is taking the drug, it can't spread the infection. So it's now kept in control.
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Khaled Hosseini
Afghanistan’s Tumultuous History
Khaled Hosseini: Like any other first time novelist who writes a novel in the first person, those first books, as you know, tend to be a little more autobiographical than the subsequent ones. It's not a memoir by any stretch of imagination, although I have surprisingly a hard time convincing some of my readers of that. You know, there are some parallels within my life and the life of the boy in The Kite Runner. I grew up in Kabul in the same era, I went to the same school, we both were kind of precocious writers, we both love film, loved those early Westerns of the '60s and '70s. We love poetry and reading and writing from a young age, both me and this character. And both of us left Afghanistan and became political refugees in the U.S., and probably the sections in the book that resemble my life more than any other are the ones in the Bay Area, where Amir and his father are selling the goods at the flea market and socializing with other Afghans who left Afghanistan. I did that with my father. We would go to the flea market to sell some junk, and we just socialized with other Afghans. So there is quite a bit of me in the book. The story line itself, what happens between the boys and the fallout from that, that just -- that is all imagination.
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Khaled Hosseini
Afghanistan’s Tumultuous History
I think writers have the ability to kind of get out of their own skin for a while and imagine what it would be like to live in somebody else's skin. And for me, there were periods where I imagined what it would be like to be wearing the burka and to see the world through that grid. Okay, so imagine you are standing on that street corner with five or six kids to feed and that's the life you have. What is your next move, what do you feel, what are you thinking? There is some element of that, and maybe writers have slightly a better ability of doing that than people who aren't writers. I don't know, but once I made that leap that I discussed, it seemed far more natural for me. I had also the benefit of talking to my mom and my wife and consulting them now and then on things, and they were very helpful, they were very helpful. But I met women in Afghanistan and I heard their stories. I mean, you can't walk up to a woman in a burka on a street corner and talk to her. I don't want to give that image, but I spoke to women who work for NGOs, who were taking care of those women who are fully covered and who won't talk to men. You know, and I heard a lot about their lives, about what they go through and the hardships and the challenges and what is the hope. And what I found is, by and large, the things that they want were very modest in scope, basically a roof for their kids and water. And so I always keep honing back on that and to come back to the idea. And these characters, these women Mariam and Laila, were not based on any individuals that I met in Kabul, but rather they are created out of that collective experience of those collective voices that I heard during that trip.
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