Adam Smith, Telephone interview recorded minutes after the prize announcement, Nobel Prize Outreach, 7 October 2009 source ↗
You can see your political career going up in smoke, but more importantly, you also worry about your family.
Day one of my first job out of college, my boss found out that I didn't know how to enter data into Lotus 1-2-3. That's a spreadsheet—ask your parents. His mouth dropped open and he said, ‘I can't believe you got this job without knowing that”—and then walked out of the room. I went home convinced that I was going to be fired. I thought I was terrible at everything… but it turns out I was only terrible at spreadsheets.
No one has a 5.0 in real life. In fact, when you finish school, the whole notion of a GPA just goes away. When you're in school, every little mistake is a permanent crack in your windshield. But in the real world, if you're not swerving around and hitting the guard rails every now and then, you're not going fast enough. Your biggest risk isn't failing, it's getting too comfortable.
I got quite nice results in my one-question studies, but never wrote up any of the work, because I had set myself impossible standards: in order not to pollute the literature, I wanted to report only findings that I had replicated in detail at least once, and the replications were never quite perfect. I realized only gradually that my aspirations demanded more statistical power and therefore much larger samples than I was intuitively inclined to run. This observation also came in handy some time later.
Often, what happens in science is you got a problem and you solve it, and then there’s not much else to do and you have to move on. But the ribosome turned out to be a rather rich gold mine. Perhaps I’m a little intellectually lazy and feel like, “Why should I bother thinking about something else?” Maybe at some point, I should have thought, “I should do something different.”
No, because I started working on ribosomes when I was a post doc, in 1978, when it would have been impossible, really, to solve it. But, it was just a fundamental problem in biology. And we felt, no matter, anything we do to chip away at the problem would be useful. So it was more that that attracted me. And I think the fact that it was large and kind of difficult to come to grips with, yes, it was attractive. Really what was attractive was that it was a fundamental problem.
Richard Feynman, Norman Borlaug, Frederick Sanger, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Peter Doherty, David MacMillan
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