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Johnny Cash
Country Music Legend
It goes back to that music teacher when I was 12 years old. After the third lesson, I was singing some popular country song of the day. I forget the name. I think it was a Hank Williams, no, it was too early for Hank Williams, I guess. Whatever the song was, I didn't sing it like the artist had sung it on the radio. And she said, "You're a song stylist." She said, "Always do it your way." And from the age of 12, I didn't forget that. But that was the way I had to do it, because it was the way it was with me. I had to do it my way. I couldn't read those notes, singing those great songs, like a lot of those singers could, but I could do it my way -- the way it felt good to me. And that's what music is all about, emotion.
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Johnnetta Cole
Past President of Spelman College
George Eaton Simpson, who I am still in very close touch with, in his 90s, stood up, this tall, lanky, white American man, and he put a record on the record player, started to simulate hyperventilation. Music was playing, which I learned later was the music of Jamaican cults, and he began to hyperventilate in a simulated way, to move to the music and to talk about what were the retentions of African culture in the New World ways of Black folk.
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Francis Collins
Presidential Medal of Freedom
In that first few months as a medical student I remember a day just as clear as if it was yesterday, where a pediatrician came to talk to us, and he brought with him a couple of patients who had genetic diseases. And it was so powerful to see the consequences of a small change in this wonderful molecule called DNA. Just one letter out of place causing a disease like sickle cell anemia, which was one of the individuals that he brought, or galacticemia, a newborn baby that he brought to class. And that, maybe because it also appealed to the mathematical part of me that liked the precision of DNA and its coding capacity -- it's a digital molecule after all -- made it so clear at that moment, that day, that's what I want to do.
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Francis Collins
Presidential Medal of Freedom
As a geneticist, I look forward to the time when we can say -- because we'll have all the data -- that race doesn't really exist. It may be a social construct, it may be a cultural construct, but it sure ain't a scientific construct. And I think we already know that in some generalities, but we'll know that in detail pretty soon. And that will be good, because I think that is a chronic sore on our culture that we are unwilling to cope with. And for the 21st century, if we could focus on that as our highest priority, that would be wonderful.
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Francis Collins
Presidential Medal of Freedom
Somebody pointed me towards C.S. Lewis's little book called Mere Christianity, which took all of my arguments that I thought were so airtight about the fact that faith is just irrational, and proved them totally full of holes. And in fact, turned them around the other way, and convinced me that the choice to believe is actually the most rational conclusion when you look at the evidence around you. That was a shocking sort of revelation, and one that I fought bitterly for about a year and then finally decided to accept. And that's a book I go back to regularly, to dig through there for the truths that you find there, which are not truths that Lewis would claim he discovered for the first time, but he certainly expresses them in a very powerful way to somebody who is not willing to accept faith on an emotional basis, and I wasn't.
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