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Mohamed ElBaradei
Nobel Prize for Peace
My father was president of the Egyptian Bar Association. He was involved very much during the Nasser era -- which was one of the most repressive eras in Egyptian history -- in fighting for democracy, fighting for human rights, and I think that to a lot of extent shaped my view as to what I wanted to do in the future. I wanted to have a world where people are free to express their views, to have freedom of worship, to have freedom from want, and I saw poverty in Egypt when I grew up. To me, freedom, in the larger sense -- to be able to speak, to worship, free from want, free from fear -- I think it was a key as to what I thought I would like to do when I grow up.
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Gertrude Elion
Nobel Prize in Medicine
Gertrude Elion: I had some minor accidents. One where I was pipetting something that I probably shouldn't have been. It was a very thick solution of lye, and I got it into my mouth, and suddenly the whole lining of my mouth seemed to come off. Fortunately, I didn't swallow any of it. It hurt for a couple of days. It was very scary. I never did that again. Usually, you are supposed to use a rubber bulb pipette when you are doing anything dangerous like that. It's okay to pipette water, but that taught me a lesson. And another time I was doing a reaction in a glass tube, which was sealed, and I had it in a water bath. And I took it out, I looked at it, put it back, walked out the door, and the thing blew up into a thousand pieces. And I often thought, "What would have happened if it had happened in my hand?" I never did that again either. And other than that, I really was very fortunate.
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Larry Ellison
Founder, Oracle Corporation
Suddenly we hit a wall. We reached a billion dollars in revenue, and we were having senior management problems all over the place. The people who were running the company, the billion dollar company, were the same people that had run the company when we were a 15 million dollar company, one twentieth the size. I had an incredible sense of loyalty to those people who had worked with me to build Oracle. It was a very painful realization in 1990 that I was going to have to change the management team. The company had outgrown the management. People who are good at running a 15 million dollar company don't use the same skills. They're just different, not one is better or worse, just an entirely different skill set in running a 15 million dollar company than a billion dollar company. Both skill sets are rare and precious. But we needed a different group of managers, and virtually the entire management team had to be replaced. That means I had to ask people who I had worked with for a decade to leave. I had to fire people. That was the most difficult thing I had to do in business, asking a bunch of people to leave Oracle.
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