Read The Impossible Takes Longer Online
Authors: David Pratt
The Impossible Takes Longer (2 page)
I
gratefully acknowledge the permission of the Nobel Foundation to use its photographs of the laureates from the Nobel Museum. This is a virtual museum that contains more than thirty thousand documents, including biographies and autobiographies of Nobel laureates, their acceptance speeches, and their Nobel lectures. It has been an invaluable resource.
I would like to acknowledge a particular debt to three authors whose work I have found especially valuable: Istvan Hargittai (five books in his Candid Science series;
The Road to Stockholm,
2002; and
Our Lives: Encounters of a Scientist,
2004); Louise S. Sherby
(The Who's Who of Nobel Prize Winners,
1901-2000, 4th ed., 2002); and Tyler Wasson
(Nobel Prize Winners,
1983, and supplements). For interested readers, these works can be recommended as a rich source of information about a truly remarkable company of men and women.
I wish to thank Michael Pratt, M.D., and Timothy Pratt, Ph.D., for their help with the biographies of scientists.
The final shape of the book owes much to the gifted help of Hugh Brewster. It has been a pleasure to work with Jacqueline Johnson and Mike O'Connor of Walker & Company. Most important, Beverley Slopen of the Slopen Agency had faith in the project from the beginning and has been an unfailing source of encouragement. To all of these people I express my warmest thanks.
The supreme achievement of a Nobel Prize is almost invariably the reward for supreme effort. Whether in science, medicine, economics, literature, or peace, Nobel laureates are, almost without exception, men and women who have persisted in their endeavors regardless of setbacks, discouragement, and failures. We owe the development of penicillin, Prozac, Viagra, the diphtheria serum, vitamin therapy, organ transplants, the measles and mumps vaccines, and innumerable other medical advances to Nobel laureates whose persistence drove them to conduct repeated experiments in the face of failure and skepticism. Writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Beckett, and Naipaul refused to be discouraged by early rejection and apathy. Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn are well known for the official persecution they endured, but many other Nobel writers suffered without being defeated by neglect, censure, exile, and imprisonment. And if the world is a slightly safer place today than it was a half century ago, this is partly due to the tenacity and dedication of the men and women who have been honored with the Nobel Peace Prize.
Such commitment springs in large part from passion for their vocations. Most Nobel laureates find their mission in life early and never abandon it. Arbitrary retirement age rarely stops them or even slows them down. An exception was Frederick
Sanger, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1958 and again in 1980. He worked at his bench in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge up to the eve of his retirement at age sixty-five, at which point he closed the door of his laboratory and left science completely in favor of gardening.
But the traditional image of the workaholic genius matches few Nobel laureates. While some have worked exclusively in a single specialized area, others have excelled in more than one field. Many laureates served with distinction as soldiers or with wartime resistance organizations. Others nurtured private excellence in sports or music. And the biographies of most of them reveal these men and women as individuals marked by personal charm and integrity.
Something of the character of Nobel Prize winners is manifested by their reactions on winning the award. Despite the fanfare, the pomp and circumstance of the award ceremonies, and the expectation of the media that new Nobels will have informed opinions on everything within and outside their subject, modesty rather than arrogance characterizes the response of the prize winners. Laureates from the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University claim that the main benefit of the prize is the lifetime right to one of the "Reserved for NL" parking spaces. An incident involving Glenn Seaborg is illustrative. At a U.S. Senate hearing in 1970, an elderly senator from Louisiana asked Seaborg sarcastically, "What do you know about plutonium?" With admirable restraint, Seaborg gave a "vague but reassuring answer." He was the discoverer of plutonium.
1. The difficult is what takes a little time; the impossible is what takes a little longer.
Fridtjof Nansen
PEACE, 1922
2. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
LITERATURE, 1969
3. All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
William Faulkner
LITERATURE, 1949
4. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
Ernest Hemingway
LITERATURE, 1954
5. I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.
Boris Pasternak
LITERATURE, 195 8
6. Have you not succeeded? Continue! Have you succeeded? Continue!
Fridtjof Nansen
PEACE, 1922
7. I don't believe I have special talents. I have persistence . . . After the first failure, second failure, third failure, I kept trying.
Carlo Rubbia
PHYSICS, 1984
8. I think and think for months and years, ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
9. Just take a risk. Go for it. I think if you crash and burn trying, it's still going to be better than if you never tried at all.
Roderick MacKinnon
CHEMISTRY, 2003
10. Saints, it has been said, are the sinners who go on trying. So free men and women are the oppressed who go on trying and who in the process make themselves fit to bear the responsibilities and uphold the disciplines which will maintain a free society.
Aung San Suu Kyi
PEACE, 1991
11. I have, despite all disillusionment, never, never allowed myself to feel like giving up. This is my message today; it is not worthy of a human being to give up.
Alva Myrdal
PEACE, 1982
12. The greatest joy of life is to accomplish. It is the getting, not the having. It is the giving, not the keeping. I am a firm believer in the theory that you can do or be anything that you wish in this world, within reason, if you are prepared to make the sacrifices, think and work hard enough and long enough.
Frederick Banting
MEDICINE, 1923
13. Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never— in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.
Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953
14. Work is the only good thing.
John Steinbeck
LITERATURE, 1962
15. Work is the only thing that gives substance to life.
Albert Einstein
PHYSICS, 1921
16. Without a vocation, man's existence would be meaningless.
Anwaral-Sadat
PEACE, 1978
17. Happiness depends on one being exactly fitted to the nature of one's work.
Alexis Carrel
MEDICINE, 1912
18. Those whose work and pleasure are one . . . are . . . Fortune's favoured children.
Winston Churchill
LITERATURE, 1953
19. When I ask myself, "Who are the happiest people on the planet?" my answer is, "Those who can't wait to wake up in the morning to get back to what they were doing the day before."
James Cronin
PHYSICS, 1980
20. The scientist has in common with the artist only this: that he can find no better retreat from the world than his work and no stronger link with the world than his work.
Max Delbriick
MEDICINE, 1969
21. Far and away the best prize that life offers
is
the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
Theodore Roosevelt
PEACE, 1906
22. All the people who do well work very hard. Nobody who has a record of achievement has been lazy about it.
Sidney Altman
CHEMISTRY, 1989
23. Nothing is going to happen unless you work with your life's blood.
Riccardo Giacconi
PHYSICS, 2002
24. I am a very lucky person, and the harder I work, the luckier I seem to be.
Alan MacDiarmid
CHEMISTRY, 2000
25. All my life I've been surrounded by people who are smarter than I am, but I found I could always keep up by working hard.
Glenn Seaborg
CHEMISTRY, 1951
26. Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do so. The former is unpleasant and badly paid. The latter is pleasant and well paid.
Bertrand Russell
LITERATURE, 1950
27. Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring—this is one of the harshest human miseries.
Wislawa Szymborska
LITERATURE, 1996
28. A situation where people can grow old without having a job that rewards them individually while adding to the collective well-being is morally unacceptable.
Franco Modigliani
ECONOMICS, 1985
29. After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.
Joseph Brodsky
LITERATURE, 198 7
30. The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work.
William Butler Teats
LITERATURE, 1923
31. The human worker will go the way of the horse.
Wassily Leontief
ECONOMICS, 1973
32. I had never, ever thought of winning the Nobel Prize. That is really true. I had grown up never expecting to get my name in the newspapers without doing something wicked.
Eugene Wigner
PHYSICS, 1963
33. In any case, let's eat breakfast.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
LITERATURE, 1978
To his wife, on hearing he had won the Nobel Prize
34. Almost instantly the phone rang again. He had heard me just as he'd hung up. "Congratulations, Dr. Mullis. I am pleased to be able to announce to you that you have been awarded the Nobel Prize." "I'll take it!" I said.
Kary Mullis
CHEMISTRY, 1993
35. I didn't do this work; the young people in the lab did it. I just made the coffee and sharpened the pencils.
Peter Agre
CHEMISTRY, 2003
36. I was delighted too when I heard about the Nobel Prize, thinking as you did that my bongo playing was at last recognized.
Richard Feynman
PHYSICS, 1965
37. What am I supposed to be, a pompous fool because I got a medal?
Jody Williams
PEACE, 1997
38. Local geriatrics were going, "What's a Nobel? Is that a bagel?"
Derek Walcott
LITERATURE, 1992
39. In my whole life since my kids became teen-agers, this is the first time they've come home and said, "Dad, my friends think this is so cool."
Peter Agre
CHEMISTRY, 2003
40. Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen . . . I know of no other place where Princes assemble to pay their respect to molecules . . . Because of you, our wives hesitate for just an instant before summoning us to do the dishes.
John Polanyi
CHEMISTRY, 1986
41. As a child, I wanted to be a physicist. I begged my mother to let me go to Tokyo to study physics. I promised I would win the Nobel Prize for Physics. So, 50 years later, I returned to my village and said to my mother, "See, I have kept my promise. I won the Nobel Prize." "No," said my mother, who has a very fine sense of humor, "You promised it would be in physics!"
Kenzaburo Oe
LITERATURE, 1994
42. It is as good as going to one's funeral without having to die first.
Emily Baleh
PEACE, 1946
On reading her Nobel nominations
43. It is really very, very nice for a week. It would corrupt you utterly if it lasted much longer.
Milton Friedman
ECONOMICS, 1976
Of the Nobel celebrations in Stockholm
44. The Prize is also wonderful for the individual. I've jokingly said it's like being given a lifetime depot injection of Prozac.
Alfred Gilman
MEDICINE, 1994
45. People keep e-mailing me to ask,' What is the meaning of life?" And they want me to e-mail them back quickly with an answer!
David Baltimore
MEDICINE, 1975
46. Oh, no, I was afraid of that! I better go and hide.
Torsten Wiesel
MEDICINE, 1981
47. This is the end of me. This is fatal. I cannot live up to it.
Sinclair Lewis
LITERATURE, 1930
48. The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.
T. S. Eliot
LITERATURE, 1948
49. If you're not careful, the Nobel Prize is a career-ender. If I allowed myself to slip into it, I'd spend all my time going around cutting ribbons.
Daniel McFadden
ECONOMICS, 2000
50. If I could explain it in three minutes, it wouldn't be worth the Nobel Prize.
Richard Feynman
PHYSICS, 1965
51. If I knew what leads one to the Nobel Prize, I wouldn't tell you, but go get another one.
Robert Laughlin
PHYSICS, 1998
52. You too can win Nobel Prizes. Study diligently. Respect DNA. Don't smoke. Don't drink. Avoid women and politics. That's my formula.
George Beadle
MEDICINE, 1958
53. You people think it's hard to win a Nobel Prize, but it's easy. Trivial. Just put protons and antiprotons in a box, and shake them up, and then collect your prize.
Carlo Rubbia
PHYSICS, 198 4
To colleagues at Harvard University
54. A deal is a deal. It's hard to be unpleasant after winning a prize like that.
Robert Lucas
ECONOMICS, 1995
The clause in the divorce settlement of Lucas and his wife read, "Wife shall receive 50 percent of any Nobel Prize" if won within seven years of their divorce on October 31, 1988. Lucas's prize was announced on October 10, 1995, so he had to split the $600,000.
55. Some have extolled the use of frozen sperm from judiciously chosen donors. Some have even praised the sperm of Nobel Prize winners. Only if one does not know Nobel laureates would one want to reproduce them like that.
Francois Jacob
MEDICINE, 1965
56. I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work—a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.
William Faulkner
LITERATURE, 1949
57. Why, that's a hundred miles away. That's a long way to go just to eat.