I often repeat to them something that — not my mentor, but a senior scientist at the NIH — said to me once. We were having lunch together. I was despondent, despondent because nothing had worked. I had been there a year. And this guy said to me, “Look,” he said, “do you know the difference, Bob, between an average scientist and a world class scientist?” I said no. He said, “Here’s what it is.” He said, “For the average scientist, maybe one percent of their experiments work. But for the world class guy, the world beater, it could be as high as one-and-a-half or two percent.” And then that really stuck with me because it’s really true.
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Robert J. Lefkowitz
Physician and biochemist; Nobel laureate in chemistry for work on G protein-coupled receptors
United States · b. 1943
Science and medicine
About
Cardiologist and investigator at Duke University who identified and cloned the adrenergic receptors. Shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with his former trainee Brian Kobilka.
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