Research

Looking back at your career, what of your discoveries surprised you the most? Was there anything that was counterintuitive to all your expectations about the work you had been doing?

I don't think so. I suppose my work has been incremental, in the small steps towards to the solution, rather than one giant leap that might meet your characterization. I don't immediately identify a particular development that was totally surprising -- though, I suspect after this conversation comes to an end, I'll have thought of several!

What about an obstacle that you had to uncover? In other words, your thinking was leading in a certain direction, but there was a major obstacle that you had to overcome in terms of experimentation or other routes?

Research is a matter of overcoming obstacles. That's what research is about. There are problems. There are difficulties. It's hard to make sense of a collection of information or whatever. Obstacles are the nature of research. Maybe that's why some people give up. There's always an obstacle. You overcome one to find there's another one.

So patience is really a virtue.

Well, you get angry, but persistence is certainly a virtue.

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