At that time nobody had Brazil on the map and suddenly Brazil became a huge football nation. I was very proud because I made Brazil well known all over the world.

Mr. Rogers lives on. There’s so many legions of people that grew up with him, and they’re still in a way growing up with him. He, of course, was a minister. ... And the children of the show, in the neighborhood, are his ministry. And what a beautiful thing that is. So I, to this day, when someone says, “What are you most proud to have accomplished?” I am so proud to have been a part of that.

OK, but speaking seriously, I’m actually quite proud of my IgNobel Prize – not because of IgNobel Prize – it’s a more subtle association. Essentially, yeah, IgNobel Prize is given for something which forces people to smile. ... with IgNobel Prize they ask you a few weeks in advance whether you are ready to accept this prize or not. So we considered hard and, at the end, we had courage to accept this IgNobel Prize, yeah. So, I’m proud that I had enough courage to do that and I do not regret accepting it.

Very happy, very proud, apart from the loss of many lives, which can never be corrected, or we can’t do much about it. It’s probably the most expensive part of the struggle. But to have won the war and won the peace for ourselves, because if you look at those years of the war, of the genocide, and they are brought to an end, and then we started building and rebuilding and a sense of reconciliation, a sense of allowing Rwandans to live together as a nation. And now a proud people of Rwanda, and socially made progress politically, significant progress, economically the same. I think we could not have asked for more.

One in particular, Mrs. Gordon. I hated her. I took AP English. The AP courses were just starting in the ’50s. And you could take a maximum of two. I took Chemistry and AP English. Today, the kids come into Duke, they have ten, 12, 15 AP courses. They start taking AP courses in their first year of high school. It’s absolutely amazing. Mrs. Gordon taught AP English. And she took a disliking to me for some reason early on, and she didn’t like the way I wrote, so she gave me very bad grades on all my essays. She pounded into me about how to write clear, effective, succinct English. And I learned those lessons well. But what I remember — and I pay her a tremendous tribute for that because there’s no more important skill, certainly for a scientist, but really for almost any profession, than to be able to express yourself clearly and succinctly. And I think she really taught me that.

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.