[Laughs] It was hard. I was working at a biotech company in California, as you may know, and so biotech companies in the States, they want results, right? They have investors that give a lot of money, and they want results sooner than later, especially in the US. So you know it’s great that the company I worked at was willing to work on it and to persist in funding it, and all of our venture capitalists and so forth. And I think in a real way it was a testament to the power of the biotechnology industry, but also it was a lot of pressure on me to manage the programme and to keep it going, with years and years of failure basically. Yeah, so I got pretty desperate: ‘Surely we’ll do it before this one’s completed!’. [Laughs]
Recorded Adam Smith, Telephone interview recorded shortly after the prize announcement, Nobel Prize Outreach, 1 October 2021 source ↗