The people I most often give books to are children, and the book I love giving is Rivka Galchen’s Rat Rule 79. Technically a book written for children, but a book that will delight readers of all ages.

I read Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature a few years ago and got to talk to him about it after, which was a lot of fun. I reviewed it for my blog, Gates Notes, because I wanted other people to read it, love it, and hopefully learn from it the way I did. It's probably my favorite book and the one I recommend most often.

The book that I gift most to people, because it has had a lasting impact on my psyche, is The Warrior Within: The Philosophies of Bruce Lee. I admire Bruce Lee for his physicality, of course, but more so for his deep philosophy, known as “Jeet Kune Do” or “the way of the intercepting fist.” The key element of Jeet Kune Do is its “formless form.” Bruce Lee rejected the rigid rules and structures of Kung Fu and other traditional fighting styles. Instead, he borrowed from several styles to create his own fluid, rapidly efficient technique that was all his. In The Warrior Within, John Little explains how Bruce Lee’s philosophy helped him overcome tremendous challenges and pain to become a man whose originality, intense belief, and commitment I’ve long admired.

It was not long after Kenneth Arrow's path-breaking study of social choice, Social Choice and Individual Values, was published in New York in 1951, that my brilliant co-student Sukhamoy Chakravarty drew my attention to the book and to Arrow's stunning "impossibility theorem" (this must have been in the early months of 1952). Sukhamoy too was broadly attracted by the left, but also worried about political authoritarianism, and we discussed the implications of Arrow's demonstration that no non-dictatorial social choice mechanism may yield consistent social decisions.

Well, I will bring this technology to clinics. I really want to help as many patients as possible. As you may know, I started my career as a surgeon 25 years ago. But it turned out that I am not talented as a surgeon

Well actually I was at home. I was doing some housework. So I was very surprised.

Running CiRA with some 250 staff, I have come to spend less time discussing their data with my colleagues and students, and have been absorbed by my duties as the "chief executive officer" of CiRA, including devising strategies to advance both basic and applied research and to obtain sufficient funding. Anxious about the lack of financial resources for the future to allow us to continue hiring research support staffers, I even ran the full Kyoto Marathon in 2012 to raise online donations from the public. It was hard but helped us raise more than 10 million yen.

However, it was very natural that a failed surgeon with little experience in molecular biology had a hard time finding a position. A turning point came when I got a fax from Thomas Innerarity at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases in San Francisco. After a short telephone conversation, Tom was brave enough to give me a postdoctoral position in his lab! Working at Gladstone was one of the best decisions I ever made in my life.

my second failure in my career. But that second failure got me interested in knockout mice, mouse technology. So I think failure is important in my career

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.