Yes, a major one, along with Sir Georg Solti. Because they’re both Hungarian, I used to call them the Hungarian mafia. He was always onto me. “Have you bring to Vera?” And then she’d say, “Georg, he won’t be liking this bit.” And between the two of them, there was this whish-whish-whish, like sword fighting, and I was being killed by the both of them. But I enjoyed every minute of it. It was good for me.

Well, I mean, obviously, as I said, Richard Rodgers, very obviously say, composers like Prokofiev, like Gershwin, all of these, the great musical theater writers. I would add, as melodists, I think if you were talking about the great melodists of the 20th century, I would put Paul McCartney in there. I would definitely put Rodgers. I would definitely put Prokofiev. I’d definitely put Gershwin because he died so young, but definitely would put him there. And those, of course, in the theater side of things, I’d definitely put Hal Prince

One was Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson. He had got his doctorate in physical chemistry — x-ray crystallography — in 1920. He was the first person to get a Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology. And he was continuing with x-ray crystallography, determining the structure of inorganic crystals. After I had accepted appointment as a graduate student at California Institute of Technology, A.A. Noyes, the head of the division of chemistry and chemical engineering, wrote to say that he had decided I should work with Roscoe Dickinson on determining the structure of crystals. This was really extremely fortunate for me, in my opinion. I don’t think that there was any field that was more suited to my interests, and I don’t really know why Dr. Noyes selected me out of eight or ten new graduate students to do x-ray crystallography. Dickinson had a remarkable mind. He was a very careful investigator and thinker, a very logical thinker. When he was teaching me x-ray crystallography, he also taught me to ask at each stage in the argument, “What assumptions are being made? How reliable is the conclusion that you draw? What chance is there that one of the assumptions you have made is not correct?” “You should recognize,” he said to me, “that there is in almost every investigation a lack of complete rigor. You should understand just how reliable the arguments are that you are presenting.

Yeah, of course! I think they made that way back in like 1968 with an optical printer where they had to keep shooting each section. It was made for IBM. The idea of virtual travel versus physical travel, the idea of exploration.

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 can’t remember that anyone in particular did. I think perhaps it was my mother who influenced me the most. She was a housewife. She had no higher education, but had the most common sense of anyone I knew, and she wanted me to have a career. So she was always very supportive, at a time when many women of her generation would not have been.