Joshua Lederberg

Although I am a public figure, I'm still a little shy. I don't think my own personality is important. I prefer to keep some small dosage of privacy. 

Being successful at a very young age gave me the confidence and the capability to try out other things. 

I believe I am a person with unusual talents. I think I'd be a liar or stupid if I were to deny that. 

All of civility depends on being able to contain the rage of individuals. 

My ambitions were already very clearly fixed by the time I was 6 or 7. 

By the time I was 12 or 13, I was studying biochemistry textbooks. 

I certainly saw science as a kind of calling, and one with as much legitimacy as a religious calling. 

When I was in high school, I became interested in cytochemistry: chemical analysis under the microscope, and trying to understand the composition of cells. 

If you wanted to dissect the structure of living cells, genetic analysis was an extremely powerful method, so my interest turned to that. 

I did get a very fine education, and not just in science. It took some pressure on the part of my elders to convince me that I really should take an interest in humanities. 

I was reading five or six years ahead of my grade during public school. I was pretty bored. I made a contract with some of my teachers that if I didn't ask too many questions, I could work in the back of the room. 

I wish I had a talent for dropping things as well as taking on new ones. It gets to be quite a clutter after a while. 

I get curious about new things. My real strength is going into a field that has not been investigated before, and finding new approaches to it. 

I'm not easily inhibited by the fact that I don't know something about a subject. It doesn't stop me from dabbling in it. 

Everybody has to learn for the first time.