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

So I wish to you—I have no more time, so I have just one wish for you—the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom. May I also give you one last bit of advice: Never say that you'll give a talk unless you know clearly what you're going to talk about and more or less what you're going to say.

They encouraged me, the way I do others now, that if you really have something that you like to do, that’s what you probably should do. Despite what everybody says, that you can’t make a living, or that’s not practical, or a thousand reasons why you may not do this or this or this. If that’s what your heart says you should do, chances are that you ought to listen.

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.

The advice that I would give is try to find something that you like. Try to devote your energies to being very good at it. Try to achieve excellence. Don’t necessarily have as a goal success or getting prizes or whatever, but just doing very good work. And work hard. Keep working at it. Be patient. Realize that you don’t always see the benefits of what you’re doing, short-term. But in the end, the activities that I do, for example, scientific research, can be extremely rewarding. It’s really a very fascinating career.

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.

If you want to do something, one of the smartest things that you can do is go find someone that’s done it and to try to get them to show you how they did it, to show you where the potholes are. What are the right steps to get there? ... And not just in terms of where to go to school, but what are the things that are really tough that you have to overcome, and how did you overcome it.

so I sometimes think, why should I talk young women into being a scientist if they then end up being sort of disliked or not accepted by their contemporaries and so it’s a tricky business actually.

It’s very hard to give people advice, because you don’t know their personality. Personality is a big part of that. Everybody is faced with passing opportunities. Many people watch the opportunity come and watch it go. I say, if an opportunity comes and you have got the self-confidence, grab it. Ride it for a bit. If it’s not the right opportunity, do something else, but be positive about opportunities.

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.

I think a lot of people, when they’re really young, and in their 20s, they are on their own quest for personal efficacy. And I understand that. ... But the sooner that people can discover that it’s really about building teams, and not about personal efficacy, I think the better — the more quickly — we can move forward. I believe that.

Well, I will bring this technology to clinics. I really want to help as many patients as possible. As you may know, I started my career as a surgeon 25 years ago. But it turned out that I am not talented as a surgeon

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.

It’s a very interesting and challenging field! It’s important to study math and science throughout high school and college, and major in some technical area. Take advantage of all of the opportunities that colleges provide, including professor office hours, tutoring, student chapters of organizations like Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) and Society of Physics Students (SPS), and project-based hands-on classes.

By the way, the guys with very high grades are not necessarily the people that are the most successful in later life. They may be the ones that can regurgitate gracefully, and they get very high grades. But if the guys that have to work for it and do not have such good grades can do something extra, and prove that they can perform, they may have a chance.