H3 would definitely be one of my favourites because it was quite unexpected. It was one of my early triumphs at the University of Saskatchewan, and the main reason I was offered a job at the University of Chicago in 1945. As well, a lot of my work has been connected with free radicals. I think a lot of the support I received from other scientists for the Nobel Prize came from my discovery of CH2. In your reply to the Governor General of Canada's speech to commemorate your Nobel Prize, you said that Nobel Prizes are given to reward contributions to the human spirit, to the cultural benefit of humanity, regardless of whether they are given for the arts or the sciences.
Scientists wonder how certain things work, so they try more and more to find out.
Whether or not their work will lead to something useful, they cannot consider, because they don't know, and for that matter, they're not that interested. You just have to look at the discovery of X-rays in 1895 to understand this. When Roentgen discovered X-rays, he was not looking for them. Nobody knew they existed. Yet he did something of the very first order in scientific research, and it took surprisingly little time to apply the finding to medical treatment.