Learning lines.
What scares you about getting older?
Question
What keeps you awake at night?
Daily life
Question
What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise?
Craft & work
Question
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Identity & self
Question
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
Values & belief
Question
What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you have ever made — of money, time, or energy?
Money & investment
Question
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Craft & work
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A newer fixed question in The Guardian's rotating Q&A pool.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
You have to die of something. Let’s say we would be able to cure cancer, or Alzheimer, or cardiovascular diseases. And then what? Should we be young forever or healthy forever?
Stefano Sandrone, Interview, Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings, 17 December 2014 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 68 →
Mario Molina
Atmospheric chemist; Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 1995
Certainly not. As a young child, I remember just dreaming about the Nobel Prize, but that was just a dream. It’s not something I would have ever thought was possible for me.
Not knowing who my family are.
Adam Zagajewski
Poet and essayist
The good part of aging is that you read more and more. You discover poets you never heard of when you were younger.
More from Aaron Ciechanover
View profile →what I'm really worried about and concerned is the lack of the voice of the leadership.
Recorded
Moderator Karl Skorecki, Public conversation at Technion University, The Rabbi Sacks Legacy, 12 June 2018
source ↗
if you drive yourself to win prizes, I think you will never get it, as you are busy thinking about it. And secondly, this is a bad way of living life.
I wanted to be a physician. And I am a physician, so I fulfilled that dream. I did not know anything about science. I did not know what one was supposed to do in science. I wanted to be a doctor, and I became indeed a doctor.
Science for me is a language of peace and the only one I know which is absolutely international. I can talk to a UK scientist or any scientist worldwide about my research and they understand exactly what I am talking about. We may even find an area of mutual interest to collaborate on and together we can make an even greater impact on the world around us.
Diversifying means going abroad…Be in another culture, speak a different language, see how other people think. Leave and then come back.
Recorded
Charmaine Lim, Bah Yirou and Damien Chua, Interview, Nanyang Technological University Institute of Advanced Studies, 26 August 2025
source ↗
The achievement is not the Nobel, the achievement is the science.
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Also answered this
Henry Marsh, Mario Molina, Jon Snow, Mark Radcliffe, Shobna Gulati, Imogen Poots
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- All time & hindsight questions
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