Whose work makes you envious?

I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, "How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?" He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, "You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years." I simply slunk out of the office!

I felt at the time that Eric was much more successful than I, he was extremely productive during his time in Zurich, and worked on many very original projects, germ line, cell lineage, sex determination, where not many people could follow him. I also had the impression that I was dependent on him because he had more fly experience and without him I would not have gotten the job. This made our start in Heidelberg a little difficult, until we sorted things out, and from then on we thoroughly enjoyed working in the same lab.

Actually I was angry at my father because he had not led a life like mine, because he had never quarrelled with his life, and had spent his life happily laughing with his friends and his loved ones. But part of me knew that I could also say that I was not so much ‘angry’ as ‘jealous’, that the second word was more accurate, and this, too, made me uneasy.

I think I’ve always been jealous of musicians. You hear the story where Bob Dylan wrote a song in the afternoon and it became the anthem for a generation.

I would always be tempted to take a movie I liked less if the payday was twice as much, and I’ve interviewed a couple people that grew up with wealth and I’ve watched them navigate their career and I’ve been envious of it. Nick Kroll comes to mind. He has so much creative integrity. He just does what fascinates him.

Recently I had the privilege of joining ex German Chancellor, Angela Merkel on a panel. I have long been in awe of her leadership, not least for her endurance. She was in power for 16 years. I once asked her how she managed it, her response was "things have changed a lot."

there were a group of scientists from the University of Geneva who conducted a brilliant study. It was one of those studies that I was just so envious that I didn’t do the study and I didn’t come up with the idea.

I say envious of people who are erudite. Like if someone knows Latin very well, I’m envious. If someone knows Sanskrit, I’m envious. And I discovered that early on. So I made money on Wall Street because I wanted to make money on Wall Street, but I didn’t think it was worth the effort.

I’m envious of people who don’t need that. There are people that just wander round the world and ideas fall down from wherever, and they sit and they strum a guitar one day and they write a song, and then they carry on living. I could never work in that way.