I had a teacher who was a great influence on me, when I was in boarding school at Loomis, Jim Wilson. He was my economics teacher and he was also my dorm head. I didn’t know what economics was before I took this course. I was really moved by the course. I was moved by him. That’s probably one of the reasons I chose the field of business.

Well, I had a couple. I had a couple teachers who did inspire me. One was this eleventh grade English teacher — eleventh and twelfth grade. She and I, we still have tea together sometimes today. I was frightened before I went into her class. I heard she was a battle axe. I heard that she would flunk you if you split an infinitive. And it’s true. She would, but she also would tell you what a split infinitive was, and then once you knew, you never did it again. She just opened up to me, how language — how the written word — can also sing. And she spent, I remember once, 45 minutes on one page: the first page of a novel. By the end of the class, no one had taken down a single note, because we were absolutely enthralled. It was incredible.

quite early I was picked up by teachers in these small schools in Alabama who encouraged that interest.

Yes, there were. In kindergarten, there was a teacher named Miss Shackleford, as I always called her. I honestly cannot remember her first name, although I saw her years later. She took a special interest in me very early, which made me feel very special. Maybe I can really do things with these words, and so on, and ended up combining my kindergarten and first grade into one year. Which I don’t really advocate, because you end up being smaller, a year younger than the people you’re competing with. But anyway, she got me off to a good start.

I think I’m most proud of the fact that so many of the drugs have really been useful in saving lives. I’ve run into people whose lives have been saved, and the kind of satisfaction that you get from having someone come up and say, “My child had acute leukemia and your drug saved him.” Or, “My little girl had herpes encephalitis, and she is now cured, she is back at school. She is doing very well. People told me that she might be mentally affected, but she is not.” I run into people who have had kidney transplants for 20 years who are still taking the drug. And I don’t think that anything else that happens to you can match that type of satisfaction.

It was a very important finding for us because we were involved in nucleic acids. There weren’t many people interested in nucleic acids. There weren’t many people who believed that was the way to find drugs. But when we found out the structure, and we began to understand what kind of bases could be incorporated, and which ones couldn’t, and where they could be incorporated, it put a whole new dimension on it. So it had a very significant effect.