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.

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.

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

The operating management, providing as it does for the care of near thirty thousand miles of railway, is far more important than that for construction in which there is comparatively little doing.

When there is in nature no fixed condition, how much less must there be in the life of a people, beings endowed with mobility and movement!

Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination.

I'm a very religious person.

The mind abhors a vacancy & is wont to people it with phantoms.

There's an argument for saying that brave men deserve what they get, but it's a serious business forcing cowards to stand in harm's way.

You asked how I can be so calm. I don't have time not to be. I would like to grieve and worry and carry on, but that doesn't achieve results.

Sometimes tradition is a way of keeping going.

How competitive am I? A healthy amount. I have four siblings. It was competitive just eating dinner, like, "Everyone, get what you want from the chicken." Plus competing for your parents' attention.

You can Light Up the Whole World by Giving without any Expectation Back.