I then decided: well, since I've gone that far in medical school, I think I'd better clean it up and learn a little bit about medicine, so I had the good fortune to go to Massachusetts General Hospital. And that was at Harvard, and it was in fact one of the leading hospitals – certainly in the field of internal medicine which... which I decided to do as a house officer. I do remember one episode in... on the trip to the... to the interview at Massachusetts General and it taught me a great deal and it might have some influence on my thoughts about how you deal with young people today. I went up with a man named Warren Bowman, who was the first in my class; he worked assiduously. I was the second in my class in whatever these ratings mean. I didn't particularly work much; I was still fooling around with music although I had quit really. And what happened at Mass General is you went into a small room with four people – faculty people at the Harvard Medical School – and they queried you, and then... I only knew this retrospectively... because what happened is a young lady came and said, 'Come with me' if you got anywhere with those people; and they took you upstairs to the full faculty with my Professor Walter Bauer, or the one who was to be my professor there, and was one of the majordomos, I suppose, of Harvard Medical School, and you got another going... about and going-through.

Well, I couldn't answer more than 30% of their questions and I was pretty dispirited; on the train back I said to Warren Bowman, 'Well, that's the end of it for me because I didn't understand what the devil they were talking about.' There was a guy actually even asked me a question about physics, and Bowman said, 'Oh I answered all their questions. There was one particularly stupid one and I told them that, and they said, "What about an electrocardiogram in a whale?" And I...' He, Bowman, said, 'I told them that was a lot of nonsense. Well, I said to myself, Warren you're out too because about two weeks before Paul Dudley White, the great cardiologist was seen harpooning a whale, and he was on that board. The funny thing was I was accepted and he wasn't.' When I got there I remember talking to a physician Bill Baker, who was in the room the first time, and I said, 'Bill, why did you ask me about a cyclotron?' He said, 'Oh, I ran out of questions and I just sort of thought, well, you know, try something.' And I said, 'Well, that's amazing because I couldn't answer most of your questions.' He said, 'That wasn't the important thing; it was the style of your response.' And I think that is an important issue that I learned something from: namely, it isn't so much the absolute correctness or pedantry that counts; it's the way you look.