The Department of Cell Biology at Johns Hopkins was founded and directed by Tom Pollard, an engaging young scientist with remarkable energy and enthusiasm.

Johns Hopkins introduced me to two defining events in my life: commitment to biomedical research and meeting my future wife, Mary.

The long, cold Minnesota winters instilled in me a fascination for exotic far off places; I aspired toward a career in tropical diseases and world health problems.

I grew up in Minnesota. Four generations of my father's people are buried there.

Well, all life forms are dependent upon water.

Following my junior year in high school, I went on a camping trip through Russia in a group led by Horst Momber, a young language teacher from Roosevelt.

Now a cholera epidemic was sweeping through Southeast Asia and south Asia in the early 1970s, so I started medical school and I joined a laboratory to work on this.

It is a remarkable honor to receive a Nobel Prize, because it not only recognizes discoveries, but also their usefulness to the advancement of fundamental science.

My brother Jim and I spent many wonderful summers working on dairy farms in Wisconsin owned by Mom's cousins, and as members of our local Boy Scout troop.

One of my motivations to become a blood specialist was to study malaria in red blood cells. But in science, you discover something and you want to go this way, but your work goes that way.

My goal was to develop into an independent research scientist studying clinical problems at the laboratory bench, but I felt that postgraduate residency training in internal medicine was necessary.

Even if you don't have time for a big workout, stretching in the morning and night really changes your body.

There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.

I call for the need of world leaders to address climate change and reduce the increasing risk of disasters- and world leaders must include mayors, townships and community leaders.

I once got sacked for laughing ... mind you, I was driving a hearse at the time.

We make a lot of mistakes for women, and we'll always do it again.

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

One's knowledge and experience are definitely limited and there are seldom more than two or three enterprises at any given time in which I personally feel myself entitled to put full confidence.

We don't have a World Series or a Super Bowl, so to be able to come home with a gold medal is amazing. I want to do it again in four more years.

Entrenched scriptural literalism is, in my opinion, completely out of touch with reality.

If you happen to be one of the fretful minority who can do creative work, never force an idea; you'll abort it if you do. Be patient and you'll give birth to it when the time is ripe. Learn to wait.