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Barry Marshall
Nobel Prize in Medicine
I did gastroenterology. It was just interesting that there was so much going on in those days, because ulcers were very common and patients were coming in. Every single night we'd have a patient with a major bleed. They'd be getting blood transfusions and going to surgery. It was just an interesting thing to find those little bacteria in the stomach. Actually, I had a colleague, Dr. Warren, who was a pathologist. He's very obsessional, a little eccentric, and it was difficult for him to get any of his colleagues to take this seriously. He sort of gave me a tutorial on them one afternoon, and it was just wonderful to me to see these bacteria that weren't in the medical books. I like to do things a little differently, buck the authority, try something out of the box. Thinking out of the box, as it's been said. And the idea that bacteria could survive in the stomach, when the medical books said they couldn't survive in the stomach, that's what made me so curious about it.
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Barry Marshall
Nobel Prize in Medicine
I'm not all that young now, and my kids are partially grown up, but I've got these years ahead of me and so what am I going to do to top this? Well, I think I'd get a lot of satisfaction out of being useful and creating some jobs and training new scientists, and being a positive influence on people who might be interested in getting into medical research. They are concerned, you know. "Everything's already been discovered. There's no hope for me." And I'd just like to say, "It's so wide open and so wonderful at the moment with all this biotechnology going on." I can see that in the future everybody will be a lot healthier and happier, because of the things that are happening now, in my lifetime.
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Ernst Mayr
The Darwin of the 20th Century
My father had a wonderful library, and we always bought books galore, and I devoured all the books of explorers that went to various places in the world. I admired what Humboldt had done and Bates and Darwin and the Swedish explorers, Sven Hedin and others. I was dreaming all the time about someday being an explorer, going to the tropics, going to the jungles, seeing new things, discovering strange animals and so forth, but of course it was a dream world.
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Ernst Mayr
The Darwin of the 20th Century
I remember that I was in Naples at the time, and incidentally I went to Pompeii with Jim Watson on the day before, and I had arguments on evolution with a Belgian evolutionist by the name of Heutz, H-e-u-t-z, and we argued and argued, and we couldn't get together at all. And I went back to the hotel and I suddenly had an insight. "Well," I said, "If we have a very small population, a founder population, with a very much impoverished gene content, then a genetic reconstruction -- genetic reordering -- is so much faster and easier than in a large widespread population, and that rapid turnover in a marginal peripheral little population is the secret of why suddenly evolutionary changes occur that will not be reflected in the fossil record, because the chance that one of these little founder populations that rapidly changes will be discovered by geologists is nil." And so I got this idea of the evolutionary importance of the small population for a great speed-up in revolutionary rate. I then came back to lecture on it in Oxford the same year and finally published a paper in 1954 in which I developed the thing. And this paper was later used by Eldredge and Gould. They named this process that I had discovered and described. They named it.
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Ernst Mayr
The Darwin of the 20th Century
Very often I see a statement made by somebody which clearly to me is wrong, and then I work out what is the real right answer, and this happens to me very often. Of course, some of these answers that I find are already in the literature, but sometimes I am the first one who makes that discovery and I think this attention to wrong statements and endeavor to correct them is part of the answer. I always think about things, and if something puzzles me Well, that of course was one of Darwin's secrets. Whenever something puzzled him, he tried find a theory. He made a conjecture, as (Karl) Popper would call it, and see if it worked out and that's true even today. I go walking with a friend every day and constantly he's amazed at me. I see something and I begin to ask questions. Why are these big rocks here? There shouldn't be any big rocks here, you know. Things like that. I like to ask questions and I think that is part of the secret of my success, that I'll ask questions and occasionally I'll find a very good answer.
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Willie Mays
Baseball Hall of Fame
I think the key to that particular play was the throw. I knew I had the ball all the time. In my mind, because I was so cocky at that particular time when I was young, whatever went in the air I felt that I could catch. That's how sure I would be about myself. When the ball went up I had no idea that I wasn't going to catch the ball. As I'm running -- I'm running backwards and I'm saying to myself, "How am I going to get this ball back into the infield?" I got halfway out. As I'm catching the ball I said, "I know how I'm going to do it." I said, "You stop " -- I'm visualizing this as I'm running. It's hard to tell people that -- what I'm doing as I'm running. I know people say, "You can't do all that and catch a ball." I said, "Well, that's what I was doing. Okay?" I was running, I was running. I'm saying to myself, "How am I going to get this ball back in the infield? "So now as I catch the ball -- if you watch the film close -- I catch the ball, I stop immediately, I make a U-turn. Now if I catch the ball and run and turn around -- Larry Doby which is on second, Al Rosen on first -- Larry can score from second. Because Larry told me -- I didn't see this, Larry had told me many times -- "I was just about home when you caught the ball, I had to go back to second and tag up and then go to third." So he would have scored very easily. So I said, well -- as I'm running, I've got to stop and make a complete turn. You watch the film and you'll see what I'm talking about. I stopped very quickly, made a U-turn, and when I threw the ball I'm facing the wall when the ball is already in the infield. So when you talk about the catch, more things went into the play than the catch. The throw was the most important thing because only one guy advanced, and that was Larry, from second to third. Al was still on first. And that was the key. To me it was the whole World Series.
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