Life will have terrible blows, horrible blows, unfair blows. Doesn't matter. And some people recover and others don't. And there I think the attitude of Epictetus is the best. He thought that every mischance in life was an opportunity to behave well. Every mischance in life was an opportunity to learn something and your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity, but to utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion.

So we had to take this special exam and I flunked it. Erv Upton passed it, and I was scared. I figured if I failed it, I wouldn’t have any chance of getting in. So I failed it beautifully. ... And so it was the first year of this general college, which gave an Associate of Arts degree after two years, and that was expected to be a terminal course. It turned out it wasn’t.

No one has a 5.0 in real life. In fact, when you finish school, the whole notion of a GPA just goes away. When you're in school, every little mistake is a permanent crack in your windshield. But in the real world, if you're not swerving around and hitting the guard rails every now and then, you're not going fast enough. Your biggest risk isn't failing, it's getting too comfortable.

Right, it’s true, it’s true. We didn’t think of ourselves as that, you know everybody … There’s an element of craft in the work, you know, we’re putting one foot in front of the other. Trying to get more experiments to work than fail but in hindsight, yes, there’s some truth in that.

I surround myself with brilliant people who are wise and whose advice I can lean on at every possible moment. The Genome Project is a wonderful team effort. It’s not my project, this is a project that involves close to 1,000 scientists at institutions all over the world. The United States is taking a larger role than any other country, but many other countries are participating. In the U.S. we have a large number of genome centers. We have experts in almost every area. I have advisors who are willing to give up their time and energy to making sure we get there responsibly. It is a heavy load of responsibility, but I can share that load with people who are every bit as committed to the future of this endeavor as I am.