Which book changed the way you think, and what did it change?

I fell in love with the stories by William Beebe, who was an ocean explorer. He discussed what it was like to go down inside a submersible, and peer out of a port hole and see beautiful, luminescent fish, with lights down the side like ocean liners. Bizarre creatures of the sort that you just don’t see walking down the street, or going into the forest, or even looking around in shallow water.

The first biography I read — I think the first scientific biography — was Madame Curie . And my mother, who was a surgeon, worked at the Marie Curie Hospital. She’d met Marie Curie, who was one of her great heroines. And reading the book, I think, was the first portrait of a scientist and the romance of a scientific life.

I remember reading The Making of a Surgeon when I was in probably about the sixth or seventh grade. And that was a book that kind of got me focused, I think, on the career path. And I remember, one thing in there I still remember is that you can always tell you’ve really arrived as a surgeon when the nurses in the hospital ask you to be their physician.

I picked What Is Ancient Philosophy? by Pierre Hadot. That book, and philosophy as a way of life. And this is where Hadot brings out that philosophy is not primarily about the propositional. It’s not primarily about declarative discourse. Philosophy is a way of life in which you’re training skills, states of mind, perspectives, traits of characters, and those are all the components of virtue.