Checking email when I don’t know an answer.

Jumping to conclusions. We all create hypotheses in undisciplined fashion, and then you have to go back and be intellectually disciplined.

Wasting time reading blogs, magazines, newspapers. They have their place but they can become an addiction. And the real ways to gain understanding about issues are reading books and traveling.

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.”

Oh, all the time. We have a fear all the time. But that’s what keeps us going, that’s what keeps us focused. You have to have a fear. People who say, “I have no fear. I’m not afraid of ever failing,” are kidding themselves. Sometimes it’s the fear of failure, of not wanting to fail, that makes people as great as they are. I know that’s what pushes me, a lot.

I don’t like those people that only want to be nice to people that they consider their equal or above them as far as maybe they’ve got money or something like that.

I had a teacher who was a great influence on me, when I was in boarding school at Loomis, Jim Wilson. He was my economics teacher and he was also my dorm head. I didn’t know what economics was before I took this course. I was really moved by the course. I was moved by him. That’s probably one of the reasons I chose the field of business.

One person that is my role model is my father. ... He’s a man who taught me something very important. And that was — give back to society what you’ve taken out.

I’m very proud of that and I started a drug and substance abuse program in middle schools in New York to help the worst performing schools.

Family is the center of my life. Without a doubt, the saddest day of my life was July 13, 1991, when I lost my eldest son, Harrison, in a car accident.