Nobel Prize Dialogue: My best teacher

So, may I welcome on stage Serge Haroche, Mike Kostolitz, Bruce Boitler, Cathy Davidson and Thulia Madonsela again, please. Thank you. Great. So, we just wanted to have you reflect on stories, brief stories, because we don't have very long, about who your best teachers were and why. Just to give us some inspiration. Cathy, why don't you begin? Ah, yes. So, I really pondered this one because I was a terrible student. I went to many schools and was kicked out of every single one. But, at every point in my life, there was one teacher who said, there's something special about you. And in high school, Mrs. Lipman nominated me for the biggest award at our high school, an international award, when I was kicked out of the school I was kicked out of, after I was kicked out of my own school. I was grateful to her, but it's taken me many years to really understand what that meant institutionally, for a teacher to put her faith in somebody who was in that much trouble, and who had done so many bad things, over more typical straight A honors students. You know, and that's kind of an amazing thing. And I think we all have that in our lives, the teacher who saw something in us when no one else did. So, I would say I'm grateful forever to Mrs. Lipman, wherever you are. And I think we all know how important it is to have a teacher that sees that special light in all of us. Thank you very much indeed, Cathy. Serge? Yes, I think the teachers I remember are the ones that I got when I first arrived after high school at Ecole Normale, when I get my undergraduate studies there. I was exposed to the teaching of Claude Koen-Tannoudji, who was a fantastic, charismatic teacher in quantum physics. This is Claude Koen-Tannoudji? Yes, Claude Koen-Tannoudji. So, he was a fantastic teacher, and his own teacher, Alfred Kastler, was also teaching at that time in the same class, in the same lab. And they had quite different personalities. Kastler developed a kind of intuitive teaching. He was more poetic. He described atoms as you would describe human beings. He gave a kind of closeness to the topic. And Claude, on the other hand, was very rational. He explained things in a very clear way, and I immediately knew that I wanted to work with him. And I was very glad when he accepted me as a graduate student. And then it was very challenging. He was asking very deep questions. When we had a problem in the evening, I knew that I was challenged. I had to think very fast during the night to come back in the morning to have some answers, because if I did not have the answer, he would give the answer. And that would be a challenge. And after that, after my PhD, he asked me to go abroad to be exposed to other experiences. And after that, I came back to the same lab, and Kastler and Koen-Tannoudji left me complete freedom to start my own research. So I am very grateful about that. It's a mixture of my... I admire Claude and Kastler for their brightness, for their openness, and also for letting the young people in their group to develop their independence. And I think it's a very important factor in my case. There are different kinds of Nobel Prizes. Some of them stand alone. The best example is Einstein. I think Einstein had no teacher, no scientific father, and no scientific children either. In my case, I belong to a family. My scientific father got a Nobel Prize, and my scientific grandfather got a Nobel Prize. But that's not that strange. There are many other examples, I think. And in some cases, it's not the scientific family. It's the scientific family and the real family. You have father and son who get the prize. So I think there is an atmosphere which is conductive to the freedom of research. You need trust. You need to be trusted, and you need to be able to develop long-term projects without having to be forced to publish all the time. So what I am saying here is also a reflection of what science has become since and I think these conditions are now much more difficult to fulfill than it was a case 30 years ago. Thank you. And already the two stories we've heard illustrate how best teachers need to be different depending on the people they're teaching. Bruce? I just spoke about the scientific father, and I would say that my best teacher, if you can hear me. I think it's on. Yes, I was saying that my scientific father, if I had one, was my biological father, Ernest Boidler. He was a very precocious biomedical scientist himself. He went to medical school, didn't have a PhD, but was predominantly interested in science, was very precocious, graduated at the age of 21, made his major discoveries by his late 20s and early 30s, discovered X chromosome inactivation in human females, for example, developed a treatment for hairy cell leukemia, 2-chlorodeoxyadenosine, still used today, developed a treatment for Gaucher's disease. So he was interested in a lot of different biomedical problems and was highly successful with them. He taught me to read when I was 5 or so, and when he saw I was interested in biology, we had innumerable conversations as I was growing up. I began working in his lab at the age of 14, and as I matured and became an independent scientist, these conversations continued. The only problem with having a father like that, I would say, is that you're supposed to surpass your teachers. That was a little bit difficult for me to do. It was psychologically difficult even for me to beat him in a game of chess because I was so much in awe of him, although that day did come and then we were more or less evenly matched. As I got older, I followed his advice less and less. There was maybe a little bit of strain between us. He felt in a way it was a kind of arrogance if I didn't take his advice. But I wouldn't say we ever had a rift on that account, and I have to say I'm extremely grateful to him. The only sad part about my long relationship with my father was that he died three years before I won the Nobel Prize, which is a pity, but perhaps he knew I was on my way to good things. So those of us who have teenage children might be interested to know why it was, what he had that was special that made you listen to him so carefully? Because you were not rebellious as a teenager. Very interesting question. I didn't become a rebellious teenager until I was about 40 maybe. Just a little bit slow. Well, there's some secret he had obviously. Mike. Well, I would agree with, because I guess my first teacher was also my father. However, there's one difference. My father started life as a physiologist and later turned himself into a neuropharmacologist, and he actually was the discoverer of the so-called enkephalins. And I remember many arguments and conversations with him because he was saying, look, I've got this idea. Morphine has a particular action on the human body, but then he was asking the question, why should this morphine stuff do what it does? There must be something similar naturally occurring in the brain which has a similar action. So he, you know, did some experiments basically involved getting his postdocs and younger people to go down to the slaughterhouse and extract a load of pig's brains from the slaughterman, pay them with a bottle of scotch or something, then take them back to the lab, which was an old building in the granite city in the town of Aberdeen in Scotland. And then they take all these pig's brains down to the men's john and pound them into a paste, and then do experiments on them. And so from this, he discovered the enkephalins and the receptors. And of course, you could say that my father was the godfather of the opioids. So he's got a lot to answer for, in a sense, because of the present opioid addiction crisis, but that's a different story. Now, when I was about 10 or so, he took me to his lab. I loved going to his lab and poking around all the machines and seeing what these machines were trying to do to things. But then my thought of becoming a sort of physiologist suddenly followed my father's footsteps. But then I found, I was walking around and I found this, looked in a wastebasket, and to my horror, there was a dead cat in there with his skull cut off, his brain exposed. So that was it, as far as I was concerned. I didn't want to get involved in that sort of thing. So your best teacher was aversion therapy? Yeah, right. And so I decided that I'd do something simpler like physics, you know, involving the less of this animal sacrifice. Thank you. Thank you. We're very short of time, Mike. Okay. Well, then let me just say one more thing. Then my next great teacher took some time to find, and that was actually when I was a postdoc and I went to Birmingham University. And I finally learned what physics was really all about from David Thouless. And that was quite an experience because it involved, Thouless had a very awkward reputation in the department as a man who didn't suffer fools gladly, and everybody else by David's standards was a fool. So approaching Thouless took a lot of nerve. But Thouless turned out to be the best teacher I ever had because he taught me what physics is really all about, which I'd never discovered before. And since then, we've gone on very well together. In fact, we got the Manus 2016 Nobel Prize together. So we're talking about lineages. He's your Nobel brother rather than your, he was your mentor who became your Nobel brother. I guess so, yes. Okay. Thank you very much indeed, Mike. Tuli, please. I think it's working. Is it working? Thank you. My best teacher was my sociology lecturer, Patricia McFadden. She is the person who gave me my social justice grounding. But more importantly, she gave me a perspective on life that helped me to understand that systems are created by human beings, and systems can be redesigned by us human beings. From her teaching, we learned in the sociology class about class, race, gender, and all sorts of manner in which society is hierarchized. But her emphasis was around the fact that as young people and as human beings, we have the power in collaboration with each other to re-examine society and to create the society we dream of becoming members of. And this for me was helpful because it got me into human rights law. As a lawyer, it was difficult in South Africa to be a lawyer thinking that the law was part of the injustices, and there was a gap between law and justice. But the grounding I was given and the tools I was given sent me into law reform, and I was involved in drafting the South African constitution and various laws really that have sought to provide a framework for South Africa's democracy. And I think it's still the same grounding that I'm using now in the Tuma Foundation to make democracy work for all by working with young people to redefine democracy, to reboot democracy, to make sure that it does what it was meant to do when it was conceived in 5th century Athens. It's also the basis of the M plan for social justice that I was talking about earlier, where we're looking at re-anchoring South Africa's democracy by making sure that we work for social justice for all. Thank you. Thank you very very much indeed, thank you. Lovely thought to end on, and I'm sure that all of you have stories about your best teachers that would be nice to hear actually, maybe as we share a drink at the end of the meeting people can swap their stories. But for now I would just like to thank all of my five panellists for their reflections. Thank you very much indeed.