So in each of your roles as a physician, as a scientist, and as a mentor to other people, how has storytelling helped you? And how can leaders use stories effectively in whatever they're trying to do to get their message across more effectively?

So this is a very important question.

I think some of us are... just by disposition and personality, have more of a tendency to be raconteurs than others.

Anybody can develop their skills in this area, but I think some people just comes more naturally to than others.

But I think I was always... kind of drawn to storytelling.

I loved reading when I was a child.

I loved reading stories.

So where's that balance between the race to be first against the cooperation to get the best result possible?

Over the years, many of those he has mentored have gone on to make remarkable contributions to science, including several Nobel Prize winners.

After I won the Nobel Prize, they established the Lefkowitz Lecture in my honor.

And these posters represent each of the lecturers who have given the Lefkowitz Lecture.

He discovered leptins.

Several of these lecturers, after they gave the Lefkowitz Lecture, won the Nobel Prize.

So this guy, Jim Allison, invented immunotherapy for cancer.

And two years after he gave the lecture, he won the Nobel Prize.

I have a friend who's working with her early stage and now she's a

Could you share with us one story in the book?

When I was failing during the first six months, uh, at the NIH, uh, I became kind of depressed, uh, because I'd never failed before.

Uh, and it was not that I wanted to be a scientist and I was being disappointed, I just, I never failed before in, in a long way like that.

Uh, so I went home, uh, over the Thanksgiving holiday, and by then I was married and had some young children.

We went home from Washington, where I was at the NIH, to New York City, and we spent Thanksgiving, uh, with my parents and my in-laws.

Uh, and, uh, I talked with my dad.

I was an only child, and I was very close to my dad.

Yeah.

Because you were asking questions that you were interested in answering.

But let me, you know, you... hit on a point that I think is worthy of emphasis, and it relates to mentoring and also to another interesting phenomenon, which is of interest to me, of lineages in science.

So you said that I had worked on things that were interesting and important.

And of course, one of the most it's not the most important thing in any scientist's career, are the decisions he or she makes about what are you going to work on, right? I mean, in the moment you decide what your question is, you're pretty much setting the path for how important that work is gonna be.

In other words, if you choose an unimportant or trivial problem, you may solve that problem up, down and sideways, but it doesn't matter and nobody cares because it's a trivial, unimportant problem.

On the other hand, you might choose a really, really important problem, but it's beyond you until you spend years working on something which, if you could have done it, would have been great, but you can't do it, and you're fated not to be able to do it.

So there are really two antithetical ways you can fail in research.

We've heard about it, we've read about it, but how did you feel when the phone rang?