What counsel would you give your twenty-year-old self — and what should they ignore?

You have to be intelligent, and be able to cope with stress. It is a stressful life, both mentally and physically. Those are the qualities to succeed as a surgeon.

Get on with it. But make sure you do want to do it. I think that’s the important thing, to be something that you would enjoy. If you only just go into science to get rich or to win gold medals, then I wouldn’t bother, but if you really want to enjoy yourself in the lab, then do it.

Study broadly. Don’t specialize too early. Read history. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to specialize, but within the limits that you have to take obligatory courses to get a degree, keep your general education as broad as you can, because you never know what doors are going to open to new opportunities — ten, 15, 20 years down the road — because of changes in science and technology.

Certainly, if you want to get into the field of biology these days, you should also study anthropology because so much work now is with communities. How do you help communities? How do you convince communities to protect their environment? — Especially if, let’s say, you have a tiger eating your cows. The natural gesture is to kill that tiger. Well, what are the alternatives? That’s the kind of thing one is now increasingly working with.