And like most nurses, I found myself running into certain frustrations. I started to look for ways to make a better argument, to advocate more convincingly for the people under my care. That led me to read up on civil law and produce a few research papers, and then I did a master’s degree in health science and also an MBA. All of that allowed me to see other sides of the problem. It also showed me how issues affecting nurses could be elevated by approaching ministers and other people in power with sound, evidence-based arguments.

No, because I started working on ribosomes when I was a post doc, in 1978, when it would have been impossible, really, to solve it. But, it was just a fundamental problem in biology. And we felt, no matter, anything we do to chip away at the problem would be useful. So it was more that that attracted me. And I think the fact that it was large and kind of difficult to come to grips with, yes, it was attractive. Really what was attractive was that it was a fundamental problem.

I’m glad now I did it. It took up all my middle years. I started it in 1972, and I published it in 1988, and my middle years all went into it, but I am glad I put them into it. Otherwise I’d have just been writing newspaper stories. It’s a worthy profession. It’s a good profession, but the newspaper, after it’s published, is something to wrap the fodder in the next day. ... A book sits on the shelf, and I really wanted to do this. I’m glad that I had done it.

Sherry offered me a list of research options: the one project that intrigued me the most consisted of finding out the environmental fate of certain very inert industrial chemicals – the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) – which had been accumulating in the atmosphere and which at that time were thought to have no significant effects on the environment. This project offered me the opportunity to learn a new field – atmospheric chemistry – about which I knew very little; trying to solve a challenging problem appeared to be an excellent way to plunge into a new research area.

In particular, my decision to sell McDonald's was a very big mistake. Overall, you would have been better off last year if I had regularly snuck off to the movies during market hours.

Ironically, though, this is also the purchase in which I made my biggest mistake - of a kind, however, never recognized on financial statements. We paid $600 million in 1989 for Gillette preferred shares that were convertible into 48 million (split-adjusted) common shares. Taking an alternative route with the $600 million, I probably could have purchased 60 million shares of common from the company. The market on the common was then about $10.50, and given that this would have been a huge private placement carrying important restrictions, I probably could have bought the stock at a discount of at least 5%. I can't be sure about this, but it's likely that Gillette's management would have been just as happy to have Berkshire opt for common. But I was far too clever to do that.

Well, I won't say what I thought about them, particularly related to Bill Gates, but I would say it's astounding to me how human people are. I mean, it, here you had a guy that was a convicted guy, a sensational con man, and the percentage of people that he knocked off. I mean, whether it was, he found their weakness, it might have been sex. It might be power, it might be, whatever it might be.

Most investors, of course, have not made the study of business prospects a priority in their lives. If wise, they will conclude that they do not know enough about specific businesses to predict their future earning power. I have good news for these non-professionals: The typical investor doesn't need this skill. ... The goal of the non-professional should not be to pick winners – neither he nor his "helpers" can do that – but should rather be to own a cross-section of businesses that in aggregate are bound to do well. A low-cost S&P 500 index fund will achieve this goal.

The extraordinary delegation of authority now existing at Berkshire is the ideal antidote to bureaucracy. In an operating sense, Berkshire is not a giant company but rather a collection of large companies. At headquarters, we have never had a committee nor have we ever required our subsidiaries to submit budgets (though many use them as an important internal tool). We don't have a legal office nor departments that other companies take for granted: human relations, public relations, investor relations, strategy, acquisitions, you name it. We do, of course, have an active audit function; no sense being a damned fool.

Yeah and we get calls all the time, and there's so many calls, but the like I said, it takes me five seconds to say no. It takes, Greg's a little more polite than I am, but I just as soon get the calls just to see what people are doing. But they aren't offering anything that's at an attractive price, and what they want is a trade.