I think I’m most proud of the fact that so many of the drugs have really been useful in saving lives. I’ve run into people whose lives have been saved, and the kind of satisfaction that you get from having someone come up and say, “My child had acute leukemia and your drug saved him.” Or, “My little girl had herpes encephalitis, and she is now cured, she is back at school. She is doing very well. People told me that she might be mentally affected, but she is not.” I run into people who have had kidney transplants for 20 years who are still taking the drug. And I don’t think that anything else that happens to you can match that type of satisfaction.

I was really proud that it was my stars that had convinced the prize committee that there was good physics in astrophysics.

The progress we’ve made at home. For example, our debt issue. We inherited a 3.7 billion debt for our population and our export earnings. Today a majority of that debt has been cancelled and we’ve completed our first program with the IMF (International Monetary Fund). And also the restoration of hope. Today, you know, our image of being a pariah state, a failed state, has turned around completely. Whereas people — Liberians — were afraid to carry a Liberian passport, because you’d be seen as this nation of death and destruction. Today, Liberians are very proud to carry their passport because everybody sees Liberia as beginning to be uplifted and beginning to become a possible model of success, a post-conflict success story. I’m very proud of that turnaround in our image.

Oh, hands down, I’m most proud of the people that I’ve trained and the people that have come from my work — I mean from my lab. I think that when I look at these younger people who are now working in their own right, running research laboratories, doing great work, teaching their students, making new discoveries, that’s what I’m proudest of. That legacy of science that stemmed from — originally — just me opening up my shop at Yale University back in 1994.