In preparation for a career in academic medicine, I worked as a medical house officer at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital from 1966 to 1968 and then joined Ira Pastan's laboratory at the National Institutes of Health as a Clinical Associate.

I had learned that science is a rewarding, active process of discovery, not the passive absorption of what others had discovered.

Anyone graduating from medical school in 1966 had first to fulfill military service before launching a career. Fiercely opposed to the Vietnam War, I sought to avoid it through an assignment to the Public Health Service.

The public schools I attended were dominated by athletics and rarely inspiring intellectually, but I enjoyed a small circle of interesting friends despite my ineptitude at team sports and my preference for reading.

The money doesn't interest me. I'm not enjoying MotoGP, and I'm retiring.

Your first projects aren't the greatest things in the world, and they may have no money value, they may go nowhere, but that is how you learn - you put so much effort into making something right if it is for yourself.

Business chief executive officers and their boards succumb to the pressures of the financial markets and their fears of takeovers and pour out their energies to produce quarterly earnings - at the expense of building their companies for the long term.

Small companies need capital to invest, expand, and create jobs. And the economy needs a healthy small business community to bolster and sustain its recovery.