Excerpted from the symposium transcripts with permission of the University of California, San Francisco. Well, in the narrow sense, my field is immunology and the study of immunity, and what we would like to do is make vaccines that are cheap and effective that could save the lives of many, many children and adults in this world who suffer from infectious diseases. In a broader sense, in order to do that, we have to understand how the immune system works, and that is an exciting enterprise and a very stimulating science. I like doing what I'm doing because there are almost no other ways that I can think of to make a living where every day is a new day. And every day you get a chance to think up new things to do.
Every day is a new day, every day is a new life.
And within the fun of doing that, within an exciting intellectual environment with stimulating and critical students and generous and helpful colleagues, there is the delusion that you are actually doing some good in this world, that the fruits of your efforts are not just to increase your bank account, which is not usually the case in our business, but to make a vaccine or to make a drug or to understand how to stop a disease. And it makes the fun even more rewarding. And it makes the effort to put in an extra hour or two not so difficult. So I can't imagine anything being both more fun and more rewarding at the same time. The question is whether what I say we do in science is delusional or real.