Oh, absolutely. I think most overachievers are driven, not so much by the pursuit of success, but by the fear of failure. Unless failure gets very close and very nearby that fear doesn’t reach profound levels, but it drives us. It drives me to work very hard.

Yeah. It’s a grandiose reaction. You are claiming you could really control this, but you failed.

It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish.  I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be.

At first the research did not seem to be particularly interesting – I carried out a systematic search for processes that might destroy the CFCs in the lower atmosphere, but nothing appeared to affect them. We knew, however, that they would eventually drift to sufficiently high altitudes to be destroyed by solar radiation. The question was not only what destroys them, but more importantly, what the consequences are.

No, because I was set for it. My core, my whole life was medicine. I wanted to become a specialist. So for ten years I concentrated solely on medicine. It took ten years to become a consultant in neurology.