What are you most proud of?

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 suppose it’s easy to say, and it may be true, that my role in the development of the laser is perhaps the most important to society. Certainly in terms of applications, and the direct effects on humans, that has been quite important. On the other hand, there are other things which most people don’t know about, and in the scientific area, that I could argue are really quite important, the discoveries there.

No. You see immediately what your next task will be. I’ve been asked all kinds of silly questions, like “Aren’t you proud? Aren’t you this? Aren’t you that?” I have no time for that, because the next project is upon me.

If you go into the field of medicine, I think any, very active protein like, let’s say interferons have been isolated, thanks to these techniques and then the question was, how should one apply them? In which kind of medical problems? Some, there were some deceptions but there were also discoveries that in certain other fields these products were very useful. Another example which has been widely successful is the product of human insulin which made medicine largely independent of insulins harvested from living animals and I think if one looks at these things these are really very good examples.

I’ve been lucky that the two topics that have interested me have both lead to very important applications. In the case of nuclear magnetic resonance, the thesis data, in my thesis, concerned what is called nuclear magnetic relaxation in liquids and also some solid materials, but most importantly we measured the relaxation time of protons in water and aqueous solutions, the influence of viscosity and temperature, and those data are now the basis in which MRI pictures can be taken

proud of recognizing that as a scientist, it was not only important to do research and find new things. I also felt a responsibility to apply them for the benefit of society.

That’s easy, my trainees. In my field, receptor biology, the field is dominated by people that I trained. Kobilka is one example. I would say I have, for years — in all due modesty — I led the field. I passed that mantle to Kobilka. He has the newest technologies and this and that. But he’s just the limit case. There are dozens and dozens of people who trained with me that, if you go to any meeting on receptor biology and you look at the program, I don’t know, 30 to 40 percent of all the speakers will have either trained with me or trained with people who trained with me. They’re in the lineage. So that’s what I’m most proud of.

I didn’t realise I’m the oldest ever! So I just about made it, huh? Because you can’t be dead and win … If you’re a winner of the National Inventors Hall of Fame you can be dead. I won that prize a couple of years ago and I was very proud of that. That is the most, I would say, most important prize I’ve won.

I was really proud that it was my stars that had convinced the prize committee that there was good physics in astrophysics.

Yes, and that gives me incredible pride, and the fact that Ruvkun is the other awardee, is incredible, because Gary is such a good friend. I mean you ask me what my first sense was, it’s surprise, and secondly of course it’s a kind of muted joy because, you know, whenever this kind of thing happens to basic scientists, especially scientists working on the nematode, I think it’s a wonderful thing for everybody doing this kind of work.