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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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Amy Tan
Best-Selling Novelist
Amy Tan: Reading for me was a refuge. I could escape from everything that was miserable in my life and I could be anyone I wanted to be in a story, through a character. It was almost sinful how much I liked it. That's how I felt about it. If my parents knew how much I loved it, I thought they would take it away from me. I think I was also blessed with a very wild imagination because I can remember, when I was at an age before I could read, that I could imagine things that weren't real and whatever my imagination saw is what I actually saw. Some people would say that was psychosis but I prefer to say it was the beginning of a writer's imagination. If I believed that insects had eyes and mouths and noses and could talk, that's what they did. If I thought I could see devils dancing out of the ground, that's what I saw. If I thought lightning had eyes and would follow me and strike me down, that's what would happen. And I think I needed an outlet for all that imagination, so I found it in books.
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Amy Tan
Best-Selling Novelist
One day, after being told one of these stories didn't work, I thought, "I'm just going to stop showing my work to people, and I'm just going to write a story. Make it fictional, but they'll be Chinese-American." What amazed me was: I wrote about a girl who plays chess and her mother is both her worst adversary and her best ally. I didn't play chess, so I figured that counted for fiction, but I made her Chinese-American, which made me a little uncomfortable. By the end of this story I was practically crying. Because I realized that -- although it was fiction and none of that had ever happened to me in that story -- it was the closest thing of describing my life. Of the feelings that I had, of these things that my mother had taught me that were inexplicable or had no name. This invisible force that she taught me, this rebellion that I had. And then feeling that I had lost some power, lost her approval and then lost what had made me special. It was a magic turning point for me. I realized that was the reason for writing fiction. Through that, this subversion of myself, of creating something that never happened, I came closer to the truth. So, to me, fiction became a process of discovering what was true, for me. Only for me.
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