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Mike Wallace
CBS News Correspondent
Mike Wallace: Growing up I thought that I was going to be, probably, a lawyer. Then I thought maybe I would be an English teacher. Then one day at Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan, I walked into - I guess it was my sophomore year there -- I walked into the radio station operation there. It wasn't really a station. And I was hooked. I suddenly realized that was going to be my métier. I didn't know how I was going to make it, but I knew damn well I was going to be. All I wanted to be was a radio announcer. That was it. I could rip and read the news. I could announce a soap opera. I wound up doing "Road of Life," the story of Dr. Jim Brent, and 'The Guiding Light." And, I read a hell of a commercial.
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Mike Wallace
CBS News Correspondent
I have been in news full time now, I guess, for going on half a century. But, in order to make people want to watch, and as I say, to take charge of the screen, you must know there are some people who are interesting on camera and some people who are not. I didn't have, for instance, I did not particularly have an anchorman's mien. I wanted to carve out something interesting in the way of what I am going to do on television. So, I decided, well, why don't you study, think, research and do -- not the pabulum of ordinary interviews, "What did you write? What did you sing? When did you do this?" and so forth -- but rather go into the psyche, and into the gut [level] of the interviewee. And the interviewee likes to feel comfortable, and challenged sometimes -- if he or she is an interesting person -- by the research that has been done ahead of time by the interviewer. Strangely, that had never been done. Well, I say "never been done," I'm sure it had been done, but for television we were the first to do it, back in 1956 for a program called Night Beat, on a local station in New York at 11:00 at night when people's thresholds were down to the kinds of questions that we were asking. New York likes to discover something new, and this was new. People wanted to come on and wrestle with me, and wanted to be surprised, and wanted to be challenged with difficult, sometimes abrasive, sometimes skeptical questions.
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Mike Wallace
CBS News Correspondent
We did what any sensible reporter would do, except that if you have a television camera involved and you have a television tube involved, you want the audience to be able to see what they can see. We had heard that there was corruption going on in laboratories in Chicago, and what we did was, we hid a camera behind a mirror and we talked to some of the people who were committing the fraud. They were quite candid in what they were saying. Then I came out from behind because if I was going to talk to them, I wanted to be on camera talking to them. They were taken aback, and in effect their pudding came spilling out. In effect, what they said was, "Yes, we kited our bills," or "We overcharged," or "We didn't do work that we said that we had done," and so forth. This was back in the '70s, I guess, at a time when this kind of thing in television simply was not done.
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James Watson
Discoverer of the DNA Molecule
One should see life as consisting of a script, which is DNA, and the actors, which are largely proteins, which are described in the text to great detail. And so you've got a system of a play where you've got a script and you've got the actors, and you could say, "Well, who is more important? Shakespeare or Gielgud? Whose playing now?" And everyone'll go back and say, "The actors are very important but scripts are more important." So we're getting the script for life and, you know, every species has its own script. And initially people said there's just too many letters and it costs too much money. And so starting about 15 years ago we got together and said, "It won't cost that much. We could do it for $3 billion but it would take us 15 years," and you know, back of the envelope calculations was pretty good! It took a little less and its cost was about what we said it would be.
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James Watson
Discoverer of the DNA Molecule
When you go out, people say, "What about super babies?" I said, "None of us know how to produce a super baby, but what would be wrong with a super baby?" And if you could have kids brighter than yourself, you always want to have your kids have opportunities you didn't, and this sort of saying, "Oh, we can't! We shouldn't try and enhance life because we'll make the spread between those who are lucky and those unlucky even greater." That's a very, rather nasty view of human nature. I think we would actually try and help the people at the bottom. And it's always, you know, "The rich are going to get richer,' and, you know, our current tax bill is pretty upsetting because you're thinking the rich get richer, and so I don't like that. But I think, you know, those people really don't want homeless people on the streets because they're schizophrenic. That's not very nice to live with. I mean, those people--it's not nice. So we're trying to help those people. I think you've got to sort of assume we've succeeded as a social species because we really do like each other. We're not fundamentally nasty. The nasty people are the exception. Of course, you know, in individual lives we have our good moments and we have some bad moments, but I think one should see genetics in an optimistic way, not a pessimistic way where you've got to stop everything.
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Kent Weeks
Living Legend of Egyptology
Archeologically, I would love to finish off this work, which I seriously doubt I'm going to be able to do in my lifetime now, the tomb is just so big. And we have a moral obligation, not just to leave this tomb in proper shape, but to finish the archeological database of the whole Valley of the Kings that started this project to begin with. That's going to be several years, and it's going to mean a lot of fundraising and all the rest of it to be done. But were that done, I would love to go off and excavate a site in Egypt that has fascinated me for years, a site called Coptos, which lies right at the mouth of a valley that connects the Nile River with the Red Sea, through which -- for the last probably ten- to 15,000 years -- major caravans, trading expeditions have traveled. It was the main route in Roman times to India. The quarries in this valley were the source of much of the stone used to build St. Peter's. In ancient times, it was the route to Somalia and to the spice markets of East Africa. In more recent times, it has been a major route of invasion and trade. This city, which goes back probably into the Neolithic period, lies right at the mouth of this valley, and I think is stratified layer upon layer with a history of Egypt for the last 10,000 years, and a history of Egypt's relations with foreign countries for the last 10,000 years. I think it could be a spectacular site.
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