“You have to combine something that's important with something that's feasible. You can work on something important, but it's completely premature. The tools aren't there. Even the conceptual framework isn't there. You're just wasting your time. On the other hand, if you just do some little incremental thing, you're just wandering around and not getting toward some larger goal.”

…courses because I didn't really know anything. And so I knew what a ribosome was, so I wrote to them and they offered me a fellowship to go to Yale. And that was the start of my sort of ribosome career in 1978. And I sort of, you know, basically, you know, it lasted my whole life, actually.

…you were saying that even if AI accelerates the problem solving, the picking what problems are interesting, picking what problems are important, that at least today is uniquely human and valuable. Do you have any thoughts on how to pick interesting scientific problems to solve and how do you pick?

I see. If I recall correctly, at the time when you started deeply getting involved in ribosomes, that space was not as booming?

Oh, it had gone through a boom in the 50s and 60s when people had discovered the ribosome. They found out what it did. They found out who the players were. They discovered mRNA. They discovered tRNAs and how all these things come together on the ribosome and make protein. And then the people who…

So when you were picking that unfashionable field, did you have a sense that the technology was advancing enough so that you could solve it, or that was just pure happenstance?