Joshua lederberg

I was reading five or six years ahead of my grade during public school. I was pretty bored. I made a contract with some of my teachers that if I didn't ask too many questions, I could work in the back...

I was making a lot of momentous personal decisions. I was still very very young: when the prize was awarded, I was 33; the work I had done when I was 21.

When I was in high school, I became interested in cytochemistry: chemical analysis under the microscope, and trying to understand the composition of cells.

If you want to solve very complex problems, you will have to end up letting machines work out a lot of the details for themselves, and in ways that we don't understand what they are doing.

I started on the use of the Internet for scientific communication. Our research group was one of the very first to make really systematic use of it as a way of managing research projects.

To have the recognition of your colleagues is great. The public attention is a mixed blessing.

We are all very individual. You have to find out what you can do best, and be self-conscious about that.

My ambitions were already very clearly fixed by the time I was 6 or 7.

I'd like to put in a vote for the intrinsic fascination of science.

Everybody has to learn for the first time.