What are you most proud of?

If it’s one thing, obviously it had to have been being selected to make the first manned space flight for the United States. That was competition at its best, not because of the fame or the recognition that went with it, but because of the fact that America’s best test pilots went through this selection process, down to seven guys, and of those seven, I was the first one to go. That always will be the most satisfying thing for me.

I would say the discovery of the hydrothermal vents off the Galápagos Islands. That really turned science upside down. Until that time, there were a lot of things we didn’t know about the ocean. We didn’t know why it was salty. We didn’t know why it had the chemistry that it had.

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.

It will continue and it is due to something which I am very proud to say I invented. ... In 1975 I was asked to become a member of CERN’s scientific policy committee, that committee advises the council of CERN as to what they should do in the future concerning physics. ... we cannot go all the times through the traumatising experience of fighting for a new accelerator, making it and then fall back and so on, so I came to the concept of a constant budget.

And then in 1974 I started to work on phosphorous chemistry which is the area of which I’m most proud as it turns out. I’m most proud of my work on carbon phosphorous chemistry.

This was an unexpected benefit let’s say. There is a new class of diseases that came up in the last, yes I would say 10 years, they are called channelopathies. This means diseases related to defects in the function of ion channels and all of a sudden ion channels and electrical signals, which we’re not very popular for the general public because it’s somewhat difficult to understand how electrical signal comes about and that we all run on electrical signals but this development of finding channelopathies is quite, you know, rewarding I would say

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

I cannot tell you even. I have to ask my son and my wife that were with me in the room because I came to say ”hello,” that I’m leaving. And, I was caught in total surprise. It’s wonderful. What can I tell you? Obviously, it’s wonderful. That’s the climax that every scientist can ever dream of. I will not deny that I am proud for me, for this science, for the state of Israel, for my family, for everybody.

OK, but speaking seriously, I’m actually quite proud of my IgNobel Prize – not because of IgNobel Prize – it’s a more subtle association. Essentially, yeah, IgNobel Prize is given for something which forces people to smile. ... with IgNobel Prize they ask you a few weeks in advance whether you are ready to accept this prize or not. So we considered hard and, at the end, we had courage to accept this IgNobel Prize, yeah. So, I’m proud that I had enough courage to do that and I do not regret accepting it.

I strongly feel that this is, that I am able to receive this award because of John Gurdon and also many other researchers in the field. This field has a long history, starting with John Gurdon. So I feel very lucky. I may have played some important role in this long history, but it was not myself who initiated this field. So that’s my feeling right now.

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 am of course honoured to get this recognition for all the work I’ve done over the years, but I’m also proud for my family and for my native country and my adopted country, and especially for Turkey it’s quite important.

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’m proud any time that I see a toxic chemical process, something that produces toxic waste or requires precious metals, which have to be mined at terrible environmental degradation costs — I’m proud when I see that replaced with a clean, efficient biological process that doesn’t produce those things. And we have to do that a million times over in order to move away from our addiction to this old-fashioned chemistry that we do.

Oh, hands down, I’m most proud of the people that I’ve trained and the people that have come from my work — I mean from my lab. I think that when I look at these younger people who are now working in their own right, running research laboratories, doing great work, teaching their students, making new discoveries, that’s what I’m proudest of. That legacy of science that stemmed from — originally — just me opening up my shop at Yale University back in 1994.

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