Xing Zong and Jidi Liu, of Duke University Chinese Students and Scholar Association (DCSSA), recently had an interview of the winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry Peter Agre, who is now Vice Chancellor for Science and Technology at the Duke University Medical Center about his experiences, his opinions about science.

Peter Agre (R) and Xing Zong

Z (Xing Zong): Good afternoon, Dr. Agre. I know that you just came back from a trip to China. How do you like it?

A (Peter Agre): It was fantastic! I visited Suzhou, Shanghai. In Shanghai I gave lectures at the Second Military Medical University and Fudan University, I also went to Beijing and visited Peking University.

Z: Duke President Brodhead also visited Tsinghua University in Beijing and received his honorary doctoral degree.

A: Yes. I think visibility among Chinese students is very important. Duke has unfilled potential, compared to Harvard, Stanford or Caltech. The Chinese culture is more established there: Duke is in the south, or whatever perceptions students have that make them less inclined to consider Duke. Exposing Duke to Chinese students won't happen automatically. One thing I think worth pointing out is that Duke Men's basketball team is not what Chinese young people are going to be interested in. It is the academics that will draw top students. That's why the fact that we had three Rhodes' scholars last year is more important. I just met with Chancellor Dzau, first Chinese-born major director of an American Medical Center. He is going to represent the institution to our future generations.

Z: I agree. Let's start our interview. Most famous scientists come from a family with rich science tradition. And you grew up in a traditional Scandinavian family. Looking back to your life, what kind of influence do you get from it? Advantage and disadvantage compared with modern American family? Particularly what kind of influence do you get from your dad who is a chemistry professor?

A: My family in Minnesota in 1950s was very traditional; my mother stayed at home and took care of the children. There were six children in my family. My father was a university professor, actually a college professor. We were very religious; we read the Bible; we went to Church. But it was a private kind of religion, not this new religion that we have in U.S. nowadays with public praying against abortion, against everything. It was private in many ways. It was wonderful for us and I hope some of these values persist. My mother never went to a university. During the depression, she had to leave home and supported herself when she was 18 years old. She worked as an assistant to a maid to a rich family in South Dakota.

Even she never had the education, she always valued reading, and so she would read to us when we were small children. Every night, she read the Children's Bible to us. But she also read literature��the classic books. When we went to school, we knew a lot already. My father also gave us some lessons just for fun. We would deal with numbers. He was good; he could do logarithms in his head. He also felt it was important to know things about the world. So I think when I was about five, I knew that the capital city in China was Beijing, actually it was Peking, later it changed into Beijing. We knew capitals of every country. It was just a knowledge base, and he thought it was important. We lived in a small village town in Minnesota, but it was a college town. There were a lot of interesting people.

There were six of us. I have a brother who is mentally retarded, and this must have been a big heartache to my parents. I also have a sister who is emotionally disabled. Two kids with serious problems. We live together; we didn't think anything was special. Certainly there was no pity. I think it made for a special sort of sympathy towards people who are disabled or regarded as disabled.

Z: whenever talking about you, the topic of getting a "D" in your first chemistry course in high school seems to be inevitable. I guess this is due to the following reason: A lot of people consider Nobel Prize to be the closest thing to Holy Grail, therefore tend to consider Nobel winners sacred. They should be straight-A students, always being role models in life. My question is: what does this "D" mean to you at that time? Do you think you are a gifted child?

A: The press liked that a lot. In fact, it wasn't very important. When I was in high school, I wasn't much focused. But that wasn't really a problem. I had a lot of interests besides scholarships. I was a student leader, I traveled a lot. I was the vice president of the student body, the important person among the 2,000 people in my school, just like a special home-coming king or queen; I was like one of those people. I traveled in Russia when I was 17 years old, before my last year in high school. It was my first time out of the U.S., completely different cultures; those were in 1960s, at the height of the cold war.

At that time, U.S. and China, U.S. and Russia were enemies, China was in the Great Cultural Revolution, which was undeniably chaotic to people in China. After having this experience, I found Minnesota wasn't very interesting. I kind of intentionally flaunted being not a good student in Chemistry since my father was a professor in Chemistry and I had no intention of finishing that course because it wasn't required. It was interesting that this D in Chemistry was something came up after I won the Nobel Prize. I mentioned this just once to a reporter, immediately it was everywhere. The sense is: he couldn't do any better than that? Well, my answer is that, if I tried hard, I could have gotten a C. (laugh) I knew a lot of chemistry, but I just had no interest in conforming to the proper behavior. We had an underground newspaper. I think sometimes children from very traditional families; we have this term "act out". Parents want the child to be perfect; the child is always making his own trouble. It was something like that.

The college I went to is a modest college, it is not as selective. It is not like Duke or UNC, where there are a lot of top students. It is for average students. It was a little humiliating in that sense. I knew I had the ability but I didn't have the performance. But it was a wake up call. The wake up call was that arrogance is a very bad trait. If you want to be stuck in kind of a mediocre situation, then go ahead and be arrogant. To really achieve something requires a lot of organization and commitment. And there are some institutions that have greater activities than others; I think that's why the Chinese students are so aware of what are the top universities. They are top institutions because of both ability and performance. Having the ability without the performance, that was me.

Z: After dropping out from school, actually been into the real world, what makes you considered going back to college and major in Chemistry? Is it to follow your Dad's path?

A: It's not that I wasn't interested, I was interested. But I was interested in the Russian revolution, international politics, and relations with the Cuba -- many things that were not in the curriculum. I was reading big books, like "War and Peace". I was a little irresponsible in an inquisitive way. It wasn't that school was not challenging enough, I needed to grow up a bit. I was immature.

One other thing is that my life-long love is to make people laugh. Even when I was a little child, I would try to make the whole class laugh. And I still do that, I can't resist. This morning I gave lectures at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund for elite scientists with high levels of research support. I had to make them laugh. I just can't operate without that. So why did I decide to go to college? In fact, I knew I always would go to college. The question was, stay at home in Minnesota or go off to some good place for an adventure? The fact is I had made it impossible to go off to a good place. This was during the Vietnam War, if you didn't go to college, you went to the army, if you went to the army, and you went to Vietnam. This was something I was very opposed to, as were many young people. The country had a huge divide. The divide today is almost as wide today between people who are against abortion and those who are in favor of choice. It was kind of a bitter time. Anyway, I decided to stay in Minnesota and go to school, and I think I grew up.

L(Liu Jidi): You went to a small liberal-arts college Augsburg. What is the most valuable experience you have learned from your college experience? If given a second chance, is there anything you would have done differently?

A: Well, I would caution young people that the end of high school is not the time to wake up, really the beginning to the middle of high school. Look at the consequence of this kind of behavior. And I think, finding something you love. For me, I never thought I had the ability to become a scientist, but I love people and I thought clinical medicine would be a valuable way to have an enjoyable and wonderful career. Sort of humbled by not succeeding, I studied very hard, I had a part-time job, and I delivered flowers, so I wasn't only in the library. I studied very hard and got a number of medical school offers. I decided to go to John Hopkins, which has a very top medical school. I came out better because of my earlier experiences. Sometimes your own failure provides you an opportunity to learn something so that you can improve yourself.

But there are some things that I am never going to change. One of them is my compulsion to what is I think is interesting as opposed to what is essential, I must have meetings, I must teach this, some things are essential. But if there are things that are more interesting, that's what I want to do. Basically people who are very successful are doing what they think are interesting. The difference between success and failure are, you do something for your love or someone told you that you must do it.

If you look at people such as Thomas Jefferson, in many ways one of the most intelligent American Presidents, he didn't consider that role important. But founding the University of Virginia and being an experimental agricultural scientist, he thought was very important and he loved that. So I think one of the lessons I learned is to find out what you love, and take life a little more seriously.

I probably lectured in June to about 10,000 young scientists. I gave big lectures in China and Malaysia. I think I am making a connection, the way we are making a connection. We may not see each other for a while, but spending sometime together, that's productive and it's interesting to carry it on.

I think we don't have so many scientists spending time encouraging young people that it is worth it, go for it. Don't do it because your father or mother wants you to do it, do it because you love it. If you love it, don't give up on it because it is hard. It is very doable. The other thing I am thinking is to raise the scientific awareness of the public. We have a very scary time in the U.S. right now, emerging anti-intellectualism. Imagine that half of the American people didn't read a single book last year. 20% of the Americans right now still think the sun revolves around the earth.

I think this is serious. There are some huge gaps in this country, we need to make science more interesting, more appealing, and I feel in some ways I can do this. I feel I am good at communicating; I am pretty open-hearted. This is different from the cultural stereotypes of scientists. China is a little different; you are a technically oriented society. But in the U.S., you ask someone to think of a scientist, and they think of people they've seen in the movies. Did you see the movie "Back to the Future"? The image of dark and crazy scientist is vivid in many people's mind, and that's exactly the stereotype. It is amusing, but not fair. And it is not attractive! That is not an attractive role model. In fact, we need our best and brightest young people to think about science and technology, engineering, medicine. We shouldn't be spending huge amount of money to train our best and brightest young people to become tax lawyers, whose job is to help rich people avoid paying taxes. That is counterproductive.

L: Let's talk about your research, how would you describe the significance of your discovery of water channel? Are there any practical applications?

A: Sure. It was one of those fundamental discoveries that were waiting to happen. Water is ubiquitous. Two thirds of our body is water. Movement of water is something we don't think about because it is too obvious: tears, sweat, the ability to concentrate our urine �C a plumbing system must exist. But there were a lot of skeptics about it �C water gets in and out of cells by diffusion, but diffusion is a slow, random process, and yet we know that water moves fast. If you take a graduate student and hold a pizza underneath his nose, there will be a massive movement of saliva within seconds. That is not diffusion.

It was obvious there must be another system, but no one had identified it, so there was skepticism. We were simply naive, well-meaning scientists working on a practical problem, that of the Rh blood group antigen, which is of great clinical importance. Rh-negative women, 15% of the population, can become sensitized when pregnant with an Rh+ baby because of mixing of the blood. Once sensitized, the mother has high titers of Rh antibodies that cross the placenta and kill a subsequent fetus. On the molecular level, no one knew what the Rh factor was. And we actually solved that. But we made a surprise observation of a second protein that was interesting because it was quite abundant, had an apparent channel-like structure and was common in red blood cells and renal tubules and some fragments of genes in plants. Well, what do these things share? Water.

We were very lucky. And we had good suggestions from other colleagues, older colleagues. So people think, well, Agre is a genius. Well, Agre is lucky! That's really what it is. But it is not just simple random luck. Pasteur has been credited with saying, "Luck favors the prepared mind." I would modify that and say, it is important to be in the right time, at the right place, with your eyes wide open. If your eyes aren't open, then it doesn't matter, because you won't be lucky. Be a little bit inquisitive. And I think it's the same sort of inquisitiveness I always had when I was a misbehaving student. It allowed me to make the discovery, to ask, "hey, what's that?" Journalists are very interesting, they always want to be respectful, ooh, Dr. Agre, Nobel Laureate, sort of like Albert Einstein, I always say "No No No!" I identify much more with Huckleberry Finn than with Albert Einstein. And it is true. I am adventurous, inquisitive.

Z: "identify more with Huckleberry Finn than with Albert Einstein". It seems you really enjoy taking adventures. I have two bold guesses: one is that through these bicycling and canoeing, you rest your brain, so that it can be more productive. Second one is: this kind of spirit's willing to take risk give some credit to your research career. What do you think?

A: it might. I am not sure it helps as much as I like the outdoors. I like physical activities because I think it improves my health, and it improves my happiness. But I think that spirit for adventure is the same. Whether we make a discovery in the laboratory, or we see a polar bear for the first time in the wildness, each is a new event. Of course seeing a polar bear is not a discovery, but for me it was the first time. And I get the same rush of joy. Just like having a family of 4 children. When they achieve something, I feel tremendously grateful and appreciative. And when young people in the laboratory succeed, I feel the same thing. It was a fraternal spirit.

You just asked about lab. I think there are three parts of the Holy Grail for scientists, and I think they are all important. One is to make an original discovery �C original -- not something you read about other people doing and then working quick, quick, quick to repeat it.

The second is that you have the respect of your peers. Have them consider you a very decent and fair scientist, not an egomaniac who destroys anybody trying to compete. The third is to train young people, sort of our scientific children, who go on for the next generation. Of these three I think maybe the last is the most important. I feel very comfortable at this point of my life. We have done some things that earned the respect and we have trained a lot of young people. I still have more decades in my life, and there's more I want to do. We still have projects in the lab, trying to do some practical things. We are working on the aquaporins that transport glycerol that might be involved in malaria. If we could do anything that would be therapeutic for malaria, it will be very important.

I am trying to raise the visibility of science, not only here at Duke but everywhere. I am representing Duke in China; I think Duke needs that more than they need me to be present in committee meetings. Others disagree (laughs). I am also involved in human rights, which is an important issue.

I think your organization is particularly important. In the last week, I returned from China and then went to San Francisco to having a meeting with the Society of Chinese Bio-Scientists in America, SCBA. The reason I went there was because I was invited by a wonderful colleague of mine, Y-W Kahn, who is a hematologist at UCSF. He is a very wonderful man, he serves on the Committee of Human Rights of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the first Chinese-born scientist elected to the Royal Society in London. He led the fight to release Wenho Lee, who is someone most Americans don't know. But I think we need to thank the young East Asian scientists who contribute to this country, particularly Chinese scientists, and so I was happy to speak to that group. And if Asian scientists stay here to work after studying, that's fine. If they return to China, that's fine too, and maybe I think this is more important. We will have friends in other countries who know our culture and know Americans are good people.

Z: A France Nobel winner once said: I worked in lab for 30 years, drawing no attention from others, but once I get the Prize, everyone comes to my world. Do you think getting Nobel Prize changed your life?

A: Well, our dog doesn't love me any more than before.(laugh) Some things have changed. I think the expectations are way above what I can do. People assume I am brilliant, assume I can organize a lot of things. I'm still sort of suffering from my own habits. So I think the expectations changed and it made it very difficult. One of the reasons I left Johns Hopkins �C I loved it, it is a wonderful university, and I had wonderful colleagues there -- but I needed some support. I needed help arranging things. Look at my calendar, it only shows half of what I'm doing. It's easy to say, no, I can't, I'm too busy, I'm too busy, but that's probably the wrong message. Because I think meeting with young scientists is important, validating their pathway is important.

When I was a young scientist I met with important scientists, and it was very influential. When I wrote to James Watson, asking for an autographed picture, he sent one right back. It was handwritten; it was a photograph from the back of his textbook. Some Laureates will go back to their lab and say, leave me alone. Rod MacKinnon, who I shared the prize with, is personally very shy. And we had an interview together. Usually he doesn't like interviews and doesn't like travel, and I respect that. But I am an outgoing individual, that's why I was elected student body leader. And if you have that personality, the Prize can give you a bully pulpit �C people will ask for your opinion and listen. We should use a way of delivering message; sort of change my life in that way. I haven't changed the direction of our U.S. government, I've tried though.

Z: Let's talk about science and scientists. Albert Einstein's personal correspondences are released to public two months ago. From the letters, especially the letters in 1915, the period when he published the revolutionary Theory of General Relativity, he was actually under so many pressures, especially time pressure from his competitors. My question is, you wrote in your biography that after your group made that discovery, you found a few other groups immediately turned their attention to the same topic. Did you feel that you are in a race, to some extent? In other words, how do you consider the role of "pressure"? Some scientists says pure interest lead to big discovery, but right now scientists are always under so many pressure to publish, publish, publish, to become the first person to come up with the idea.

A: I was encouraged to get it right. I was always slow to publish. I think our work was always of high quality, but we never rushed. We held things back to make sure we had more controls. I also feel we were very honest, and by having the high moral ground sometimes things just work out. But I have to say, when we were working on this, I knew there was a very large group in California, as soon as they heard the news; they put everybody in the lab on this project. They submitted a paper before ours, conclusions that we had shared with them. It was a level of behavior I was shocked, but we didn't change our course. So that's why we think having the respect from your peers is very important. When our papers are submitted, they read them efficiently and accepted. And there was no question about the discovery thing. So I think it could be the other way, but it didn't work out that way. I bet I would be very bitter if someone else seized credit for this before our publications. But in fact, it didn't happen, and we were working very hard. But there is always a risk of that. It is important for young people think their own research is incredibly important, and for them it is, because if they lose the opportunity to get credit for the discovery it's a disaster for them. But I share this because we didn't waver, we didn't take any shortcuts. You can just rush and send it off and finish up the remaining experiments later. But we didn't do that. The work was done, and when reviewers suggested things we did everything. That's the best way. More often than not, it will work out. But there are risks there. Some people are opportunists, but most people are very decent.

Z: I am a physicist; the classical picture in physics is when Einstein played violin. Some people say a scientist should have a broad interest, but there is also a tendency today for science is divided into smaller and smaller areas so that you have to be a specialist. What do you think?

A: We were really in the thick of science, we were much focused. I didn't see my family. I didn't work on Sundays, but the rest of the week, I worked every day on the calendar. So for around 15 years, I had to be much focused. Science for me, was No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, No. 4, my family was there for me, but there wasn't a lot else. I didn't have any hobbies, I didn't go to the orchestra, I didn't go to baseball games. I tried very hard to keep up with world events, otherwise it was all science. Now I am in a different situation, I don't think that would be the right thing to do. We haven't published a lot, maybe in total 120. Sometimes young scientists, much younger than me, have published 400 papers. If we publish another 100 papers, so what? I don't think we are going to discover something more important than we did discover. So we should use this opportunity to think what is the most important thing to do and do that.

Now I can contribute in ways I couldn't contribute to before; being a Nobel laureate means I can make some statements and business. I feel in some ways that my job is like the basketball team's, but my games are all on the road. If I give a lecture to 2,000 young people in Malaysia, or China, people here at Duke might not know about this. But I think in the end, some people in the audience might choose science when they could easily take a job for a company. I think those are the victories that I can never count, but to inspire people is very useful.

Honestly I still don't know I am successful in this respect, I really want to feel like "Yes! I made a big difference!" Sometimes it feels like you are trying to raise the level of the sea. You are going to put a bottle of water into the sea, then another bottle, but it doesn't make too much difference.

L: Thanks! I am touched by your efforts to raise the science awareness. The 1989 Nobel Prize winner Michael Bishop once wrote a book entitled "How to win a Nobel Prize". In your opinion, how to win a Nobel Prize? What qualifications are important? How much of a role has luck played in success?

A: Well, I think luck plays the major role (Laugh). I think there is no formula. The title of his book is more like a joke. It is not a guide book, but more of retelling his career. And he is a very articulate individual. I think he's raised interest in science just by writing that book. Young people will see science a little bit differently. Michael Bishop is not from a high power science family, he didn't go to MIT or Caltech, but he has an intellect and the interest and I think it worked out very well.

Back to your qualification question, I think curiosity more than anything but luck. You can't do all the experiments. If you are racing to do as many as possible, that's the wrong way to do it. But if you're already on the right track, and you know this is it and you're just filling in the details, then yes, do everything you need and you can work fast.

But at the beginning, you need to be very careful and very cautious and inquisitive, but if you don't do enough experiments, you can't make a discovery. So there is no formula. But young people shouldn't think that the Prize is the reason to do the work. I think there has been something like 600 Nobel Prize winners in a hundred years �C so the odds are very small - you should do science for other reasons. There are some things people have noticed �C many people who win Nobel Prizes have worked in the laboratory of a prize winner. For me that wasn't true, but my mentor when I was a student had actually worked in the laboratory of someone who had won a Nobel Prize. Interestingly, like myself he was a Norwegian American from a small college. The observation is amusing, but it is not really true.

Z. People always picture a Nobel winning scientist who stays in his lab all the time, but you have such a colorful life with your family. From our personal research experience, it is so hard to stop thinking and solving problems even away from office. How do you balance work and life?

A: I actually feel bad because my lab people didn't meet me for several weeks. But I try to make time for the things that are most important. And I think it's important to talk with young scientists. If we look at the published scientific literature and look at I like to work with smart Chinese young people. What's left? I think without East Asia scientists, we probably will become a big version of France. We would have labs and scholarship, but we wouldn't be preeminent. And the U.S. has been preeminent. We take the money, the bio shield, the 9.11 is terrible because 2,900 people died. But since then, hundreds of thousands of people have died of influenza, but no one's talking about it. When I was a kid, there was TV footage of the Russian's launch of Sputnik. In response to competition, U.S. realized it was falling behind in the space competition, and so they made an emphasis on science. Now the emphasis seems to be on pop-culture. Things have changed.

If you say I spent a lot of time with my family---that would be a lie. I would like to. But I am down here, but my youngest kid is in high school, she wanted to be able to finish high school with the friends she's had since a very young age, so my wife is not here and my daughter is not here. They are in Baltimore. That's hard. When we are together, we try to do something special, do more than watch TV. I always want to take them on great outdoor trip. They've all done it, and so this year none of them was willing to go because they are busy, too. I like to spend time with them; we like to do things that are interesting, and sometimes culturally important. More than just hanging out.

Z. Another thing I have noticed that, for Asian countries, the innovation in science is not as good as here in U.S. Many people say, the tradition is to bow to some orthodoxy defined by something other than scientific pursuit. What do you think of this assertion?

A: I think it is healthy to challenge, but I also think there is need for some order. Just like Hitler, who was a horrible man, was good for American science because so many of the country's great scientists left. That's why Albert Einstein came here. I think there is value in challenging something in a constructive way, not to be simply negative and contrary, as I was particularly when I was young. There's a point where it is not helpful. So I think balance is good. But if young scientists don't challenge existing dogma, it will never be corrected. Part of being a scientist is challenging, but based on evidence, not ego. The whole enterprise is based on factual observations. And the creativity and innovation comes in designing the systems so you can make the observations, and then there is a level of creativity that's very hard to quantify in making conclusions based on those observations. Some people have more unusual insights, and occasionally they are correct, and people will say how brilliant and creative. But maybe it's luck.

L: Many people nowadays say a lot of basic science areas are "dead". My question is: Do you think we have learned enough for basic science?

A: I think in the area of science I work in, we know about five percent of the whole picture. We know the sequence of the genome. In some cases, we can look at the sequence and say, this protein is related to that protein. So we can guess what its function is. Sometimes this guess is wrong, so still need a lot of experimental work. I think we can do it more efficiently and more intelligently now than in the past, but I think we are still on the way up. The 21st century will be the golden age for bio-science. In terms of physical sciences, I don't know. I think environmentally, by the way, the world is threatened not by George Bush, but the industrial revolution that occurred one hundred and twenty years ago. It is now leading to greenhouse gases and thermal fluctuations. I think we need to do something about it. Environmental science is a new area; there was no environmental science 40 years ago. There are consequences to our actions. We are still very early in most sciences, I think. I think for most sciences, the major work is still ahead of us. It is hard to predict where science will go.

When I was a medical student in 1970, the first class started in September, we did a lot of science. Our first lecture in medical school was a very famous scientist, and he said, "I was prepared to give a lecture today, but a paper came out last month which was so interesting, and it used a new enzyme to convert RNA back to DNA, so now we can make stable DNA replicas." It was reverse transcriptase. This is of course a basic issue of molecular biology. When I was a student, it changed what we could do. Before that discovery, RNA was too unstable to work with, we knew some things about DNA, but to be able to manipulate it we had to be able to take the transcripts and study them in a stable way. So that made a big difference. When I was at Hopkins, two of the scientists discovered enzymes that chopped up DNA in specific places. It wasn't actually random, it was specific. They were just assistant professors working on this for their labs. But it changed everything in terms of molecular biology. So I think, sometimes we can predict, and some things we don't know. Another example is particle physics, for me, it seems pretty complicated-people seem to know everything, but for you, probably you can still look forward.

Z: For people working in Science, one needs to face a large amount of details in order to get to the final result. The simple is built upon complex. Here is an interesting dilemma, some scientists say you have to concentrate on the big picture without wasting your time on too many details, others say dealing with scientific details is a crucial character in order to succeed in science. What do you think?

A: Our lab is very small, I was always very close to the details. I was very much involved in the scientific process when we made the discovery of the water channel. As our group became larger, I kind of backed off. I had people coming to the lab who knew things, and so I gave them latitude, but I still wanted to see the details.

I think if a senior scientist is listed as an author on a paper, it should not just be because of courtesy, and they should be involved. It becomes more difficult as you become busier and take on administrative roles like vice chancellor. According to Bishop's book, to succeed scientists should try to solve major problems and make big discovery as opposed to minor thing. They should learn to write well; most scientists are very bad at writing. Avoid prestigious administrative roles, like being vice chancellor (laughs). So, particularly early in your career, you take a job like that, higher salary, office, but it's different. It takes your time. If you're at an executive level, I think it would be very difficult to be extremely innovative in science if you're not close to it. If you are to be micro-managing it and telling the post-docs exactly how much to put in, that's too much. To micro-manage a technician can be demoralizing. There's a balance.

Z: As you may know, research by Hwang Wai Syuk, a top human cloning scientist from one South Korean University, was found fabricated. It is a big academic scandal in the world. Now as the vice provost of Duke Medical Center, how do you make sure faculties and researchers here could maintain their academic integrity?

A: When Hwang perpetrated this fraud, he hurt every scientist. We were all diminished even though he was individually involved. It shows the wonderful scientific discovery has some jerks, opportunists, who are so driven to succeed that they make observations and then can't repeat them. In this case, it is very rare. I think it is very difficult for the vice chancellor or anyone else to run a police operation to prevent that. But I hope that we can create a culture that is so positive with such ethical standards, this will be kept to a minimum. And if something happens, you have to be open. It's the taxpayers' money in the U.S.

Z: Nowadays, there are many fields considered to be hot, even within a certain field, there are relative hot topics. When you decide to join Vann's research at Hopkins, it was a counterculture place. What's your suggestion for young people when they are choosing their direction in lives?

A: That was my friend's lab. It wasn't a hot, trendy lab, but it was a good lab. I guess I never made my way in science by looking into the most famous lab, but I do find people very interesting. I met Vann in medical school; it was obvious that he had tremendous insight into biochemistry. He had great capacity and interest, other things he had no interest in. I found it very comfortable, I did one sabbatical there. My mentors there were both my own age, I guess my mentors were actually my contemporaries, and that's a little bit unusual. Usually you get the most established person who is not on your own age, but I think that was very helpful for me. It was also a very comfortable environment. They are very sincere, they were not opportunistic, and they were not trying to make the biggest lab, not interested in making the most papers in "Cell" or "Science" or "Nature". They were interested in making discoveries, each of them have made especially fundamental discoveries, which I think, could also be Nobel. But that is not my call, it is the committee's.

L: You went to China this summer. When is the first time that you went to China? Each time you visited China, what kind of impression do you have?

A: This was my first visit to People's Republic of China. I first came to Asia in 1970. I traveled all around Japan, the only Japanese I know was trying to ask people for a ride and tell them I have no money to pay! Whenever I say this to my colleagues, they all laughed. Usually people know some polite greeting, but mine is, "hey buddy, can I have a ride?" I was traveling in Hong Kong and Taiwan, as I moved to the border, I looked into China, but it was forbidden. I thought, it would be so interesting to visit China! After the door was opened, I never had invitations to China from people I knew or the institutions that were well known. Then in the past five years, I had invitations, but there was always a time conflict, so I couldn't go. That's why I had this long trip to China. I gave so many talks in so many institutions, because it was long overdue. I will be going to China every year, there is no doubt about that. I had been to Europe for more than a hundred times, but never to China before. It was much more advanced than I expected, although I didn't travel in the country. And it is difficult when there are very, very poor people. Of course China is facing many challenges.

L: What do you think of the development of science in China?

A: I think it is very exciting. I think the emphasis on science is something I would like to see here. People are so truly interested and inspired about science. When I gave lectures, dozens and dozens came to ask for my autograph, and took pictures, thanking me for giving lectures, it is very gratifying. The greatest wealth any country has is the wealth of the young people. I fear that young people in U.S. are not interested in science, not as many, not the brightest ones. Economy is always based on innovation, not on just selling neckties. It is based on invention -- Microsoft, solid state electronics, drug discovery -- these all require people with a science background. So I think the passion towards science in China is priceless and it will lift China.

L: What advice do you give to Chinese young people who want to achieve something in their lives?

A: I think scientists are most productive in their first fifteen years, and so a student shouldn't necessarily work with someone like me, but go to an exciting lab with younger people. In Japan, they don't such systems, only one big boss. When Chinese young people want to join my lab, I tell them I would help them to find the most exciting labs. My lab was exciting ten years ago, right now we are doing something important, but to train young people, I think may not be the best. I think that's fair. It is selfish to keep every person in your own lab, and it is not the best for Duke if I have a lab of 200 people. Sometimes our PRC-born scientists are so good we can't keep them. Haifan Lin is an outstanding cell biologist. Yale made an offer he couldn't refuse. Duke didn't have the resources to keep him, so we lost him. He is from Fudan University, top of his class. I see this as a trend, more and more, the top scientists in U.S. will be new arrivals.

By Xing Zong and Jidi Liu of Duke University Chinese Students and Scholar Association (DCSSA). Dr. Joanna Downer also made contributions to this interview.