One of the things that struck me when I was in Harry Grundfest's lab, in talking to Harry, to Dom Purpura, to Stanley Crain, is how different laboratory work is in reality compared to what I thought. I mean, the conventional view of some people about science, my view about science, is scientists work in a dark room, looking into a microscope, and hallucinating to themselves. And nothing could be further from the truth. The science that I've experienced is a social enterprise. What's enjoyable about coming to the lab is the social interaction. I walk around and make rounds to see what's going on. We gossip. You know, we discuss lots of things unrelated to science. And it's enormously pleasurable. I would think few careers… I mean, every career has joy to it, but many people don't [know] how intrinsically enjoyable science is. And also, if you're fortunate, you come up with something completely new. You see something that no one has ever seen before. Or see it from another dimension that people haven't seen before. That is really quite fabulous. And I found it very rewarding.
The difficulty with it now compared to when I came along, when I came along, as I said before, if you could read and write you were funded. If you could show that you were serious, you were committed, you know, analogues of learning, you know, who would support that today as you suggested? But I was confident it might be… it seemed like a reasonable idea to me, and there was adequate funding for that. The scientific workforce was small, and the resources were substantial.
