The root of disaster means a star coming apart, and no image expresses better the look in a patient's eyes when hearing a neurosurgeon's diagnosis.

I knew medicine only by its absence - specifically, the absence of a father growing up: one who went to work before dawn and returned in the dark to a plate of reheated dinner.

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present.

Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job - not a calling.

I had been pursuing a Ph.D. in political science when my National Guard unit was sent to Iraq. Eight months into our deployment, in November 2004, a rocket-propelled grenade fired by Iraqi insurgents tore through the pilot's side of the Blackhawk helicopter I was flying.

I studied physics at university, and I'm still a sucker for an experiment or scientific theory.

Crystallographers believed in X-ray results, which are of course very accurate. But the x-rays are limited, and electron microscopy filled the gap, and so the discovery of quasicrystals could have been discovered only by electron microscopy, and the community of crystallographers, for several years, was not willing to listen.

Of course I have other interests, but on the other hand, science is a lifestyle in the sense that it's a combination of profession and hobby.