I would like to have been concerned about this existential threat sooner.

And so, I went to Texas Tech El Paso. I could literally throw a stone out of my window and hit someone in Juárez, Mexico. And yet, it was the most beautiful place to practice, because in that county hospital we saw everything in young people, untreated; it felt very meaningful, but my evenings were mine to write and to develop my voice, and my weekends were mine. And I eventually got hired to Stanford in a roundabout way, largely because of that.

I was fortunate even from that point of view because I got a very good research collaboration agreement with Upjohn, the American Upjohn company. So that could help me to go on with my research.

I knew what I had done wrong. I had followed the experts and put the money I had in television. The second time around I spent almost no money on television. The only money I spent on television, I spent on Ted Turner's station, late at night on something called Creature Feature and wrestling. Because those were things that I knew people looked at. But we spent most of our money organizing people door-to-door.

So the values were career, medicine. Sport was something other, something to be set aside.

I had set my mind on winning the 1500-meter gold medal in Helsinki in 1952. ... And, it all came disastrously wrong when I came fourth instead of winning. ... Instead of retiring in order to devote myself to medicine, I decided to go on for another two years while I was still a student, working clinically in London, and I did that.

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.