In Japan, however, I found myself suffering from Post America Depression or PAD. The environment for researchers in Japan was quite different in many ways from that in the U.S. At the medical school, very few scientists showed interest in the basic biology of mouse ES cells, and there was little thought-provoking discussion with my colleagues. Some of my colleagues advised me to work on something more related to medicine. Furthermore, I could not get enough funding and had to change the cages of the numerous mice by myself every week. What was worse, the Nat1 work was being rejected by many journals. I felt lonely and depressed, and I was about to give up my career as a scientist and return to the path of physician.

If I advocate cautious optimism it is not because I do not have faith in the future but because I do not want to encourage blind faith.

The strategy we've adopted precludes our following standard diversification dogma. Many pundits would therefore say the strategy must be riskier than that employed by more conventional investors. We disagree. We believe that a policy of portfolio concentration may well decrease risk if it raises, as it should, both the intensity with which an investor thinks about a business and the comfort-level he must feel with its economic characteristics before buying into it.

Our trouble is that we do not demand enough of the people who represent us. We are responsible for their activities… we must spur them to more imagination and enterprise in making a push into the unknown; we must make clear that we intend to have responsible and courageous leadership.

OK, but speaking seriously, I’m actually quite proud of my IgNobel Prize – not because of IgNobel Prize – it’s a more subtle association. Essentially, yeah, IgNobel Prize is given for something which forces people to smile. ... with IgNobel Prize they ask you a few weeks in advance whether you are ready to accept this prize or not. So we considered hard and, at the end, we had courage to accept this IgNobel Prize, yeah. So, I’m proud that I had enough courage to do that and I do not regret accepting it.