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When Stockholm Called

00:00:31.06 In 2002 I had the great honor of sharing the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
00:00:39.10 with Sydney Brenner and John Sulston.
00:00:43.21 People have sometimes asked me, "Did I know that I was going to receive a Nobel Prize?".
00:00:50.22 The answer is easy: No. I didn't know. I couldn't know.
00:00:57.16 And in fact, it is clear, it was clear to me then, it is clear to me now,
00:01:04.19 that there are many scientists who have made major, pioneering contributions
00:01:11.11 in the field of biomedicine who are at least as deserving as I was for the Nobel Prize.
00:01:20.27 Nonetheless, for some years I had been acutely aware of the first Monday in October,
00:01:33.29 the day when the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is announced.
00:01:39.23 And starting, I think it was in about 1995,
00:01:43.12 I knew when each announcement day was approaching.
00:01:48.01 I had probably progressively more trouble
00:01:52.19 sleeping the night before.
00:01:55.05 The announcement is made at 11:30 in the morning in Stockholm,
00:01:58.04 which is 5:30 in the morning in Boston, and
00:02:02.18 I invariably got up early knowing that the phone had not rung
00:02:09.08 to look and see who in fact were the recipients for that particular year.
00:02:14.14 There were a number of years where various people "in the know"
00:02:19.14 told me that this is going to be your year.
00:02:23.27 They were, of course, wrong. In addition, the MIT news office liked to keep tabs on me
00:02:31.25 for that date and for a number of years they contacted me prior to that first Monday in October
00:02:38.27 asking me where I would be on that date, just in case.
00:02:43.29 Something that was not totally calming, I would say.
00:02:49.15 However, in 2002, they didn't contact me.
00:02:54.19 It was the first year in some years that they hadn't contacted me.
00:02:58.06 And I had the belief, "Well okay, maybe the time has come and gone
00:03:04.18 and this just isn't going to happen".
00:03:07.27 Now where I was on that day was in Europe, in fact in France.
00:03:13.09 My daughter in 2002 was 9 years old and she had had a series of au pairs
00:03:21.06 and one of her au pairs, somebody our family had become very close to,
00:03:26.13 was getting married in the French Alps.
00:03:29.18 And my daughter and my wife and I went to the French Alps
00:03:33.12 for the weekend to celebrate in that marriage ceremony.
00:03:39.01 Now of course, when the New York Times reported all of this,
00:03:41.14 what they said was that I was off with my family on holiday in the French Alps.
00:03:47.04 Slightly different from a quick trip over the weekend to go to a wedding,
00:03:52.24 but you know, it was pretty close, so it's not so bad.
00:03:56.25 Now, we spent the Saturday basically at the wedding.
00:04:04.04 We spent the Sunday at a brunch and other events with the family,
00:04:09.18 and we stayed on one extra day, the Monday,
00:04:14.13 so that we would have time with the newlywed bride and groom.
00:04:18.12 And we had gone out on that Monday morning
00:04:21.29 and came back to the house of the au pair, Crystelle, her parent's house,
00:04:29.14 and when we walked in her father said to me that I had gotten a phone call.
00:04:35.10 Now, he doesn't speak English so there was some ambiguity,
00:04:39.16 at least to me, in what he was saying,
00:04:42.02 and I heard him say that I had gotten a phone call from Boston.
00:04:44.25 Now we had only been gone for the weekend.
00:04:48.09 The only thing that I could imagine that might be leading
00:04:51.29 to a phone call from Boston was that maybe the lab burnt down,
00:04:55.13 and I was a little apprehensive when he gave that message.
00:05:00.03 And he said that he had written down a phone number
00:05:04.11 so that I could return the call.
00:05:06.28 The problem was his not speaking English
00:05:09.04 meant that his phone number wasn't in numbers
00:05:12.09 but was rather written out in letters with the sound that he heard,
00:05:16.25 with, I would say, a bit of a French accent to these letters.
00:05:22.09 So I got what was the number, and looked at it,
00:05:24.04 and two things were apparent. First, he said again that I had a phone call from,
00:05:28.25 but this time when he said it, it was clearly Stockholm that he said,
00:05:33.09 not Boston, and that gave me an "Aha! That's interesting!".
00:05:40.03 And the second was looking at the number, although the letters were not totally clear,
00:05:45.13 they clearly, it wasn't a Boston number. This was not Boston
00:05:50.14 and Stockholm on that day caught my attention.
00:05:54.23 Now having said that, there were some caveats.
00:05:58.05 For example, I had heard a story some years ago, and I am not sure that the source
00:06:03.07 was the person I am thinking of, but I think it was from Gunter Blobel at Rockefeller,
00:06:09.12 who did receive a Nobel Prize for his breakthrough work.
00:06:13.10 And I had heard a story, I think from Gunter,
00:06:16.02 that some years before he received the prize he was awakened at 5:30 in the morning,
00:06:23.19 New York time, in his case, by someone with a Swedish accent
00:06:29.09 telling him something that turned out to be a joke from a friend of his with a "sense of humor".
00:06:37.06 So I began to think about my own friends and their senses of humor
00:06:42.28 and I could imagine that something comparable was not out of the question.
00:06:48.21 So I wasn't really confident what this meant.
00:06:52.13 What we did, first I tried calling the number,
00:06:54.27 and it did get to Sweden, but it got to a number not in service, so that didn't help.
00:07:00.01 And then we went and listened to the radio and watched television
00:07:05.05 until about 20 minutes later there was an announcement,
00:07:09.14 which basically had three names: Sydney Brenner, John Sulston, and me.
00:07:18.23 So at that point, I knew it was real.
00:07:23.01 And at that point, my life was about to change, really forever.
00:07:28.26 So what did I do? The first thing I did was call my mother.
00:07:31.05 My mother was in Chicago. It was very early in Chicago.
00:07:35.04 Her immediate response was: "What's wrong?"
00:07:38.17 but I quickly told her and she was, I would say, well what can I say?
00:07:45.22 What better thing can you do than call your mother
00:07:48.06 and say "I've won a Nobel Prize", other than perhaps saying, "You are a grandmother",
00:07:54.24 which I think still was her greatest thrill.
00:07:58.19 Eventually, after I hung up from my mother,
00:08:07.06 there was a message on the phone in France.
00:08:11.00 And I guess, I guess, they had tried to call while I was on the phone,
00:08:14.25 and this time I could hear the voice, and I got a phone number, and I called back,
00:08:23.02 and I reached Hans Jornvall, who at that point was the Secretary of the Nobel Committee
00:08:29.09 of the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute,
00:08:32.22 and it was Hans's privelege to contact the new recipients and tell them the news.
00:08:40.06 Now Hans was a bit depressed,
00:08:42.18 and the reason he was depressed was that he was 0 for 3 that year.
00:08:46.21 He failed to reach Sydney, John, or me.
00:08:50.18 Sydney was on an airplane flying from Singapore to Germany.
00:08:53.26 John was in his lab working and got the news from a recorded message.
00:08:57.26 And I was out.
00:08:59.26 So, this, this was a year
00:09:02.27 in which Hans felt that he had missed his annual joy,
00:09:06.26 and in fact he began the conversation by saying,
00:09:10.04 "Well by now I imagine that you know.
00:09:13.00 Would you have some time to talk with me?", and I said to him,
00:09:18.10 "Yes, Hans, I would be delighted to talk with you."
00:09:21.18 Let me mention one other immediate consequence of the events of that morning.
00:09:28.07 The question is how did Hans get the phone number in France,
00:09:32.10 and the answer is that he had called my house outside of Boston,
00:09:36.19 and there he reached my daughter's current au pair, who was from Ecuador.
00:09:42.07 And he called her, he said he was trying to reach me, she gave the number.
00:09:47.06 That was fine, but then when the announcement was made,
00:09:51.29 reporters started calling my house, and, of course, I wasn't there.
00:09:57.04 And the au pair answered and answered and answered
00:10:02.05 over and over again this deluge of phone calls.
00:10:07.09 This made her nervous, because it turned out
00:10:12.19 she grew up with a wealthy family in Ecuador, and in the area where she lived,
00:10:18.00 what happened if somebody wanted to rob one of the wealthy houses,
00:10:23.06 they would telephone there and they would see how many people answered the phone.
00:10:28.21 How many distinct people answered after a series of calls,
00:10:31.24 and if there were a lot of people home,
00:10:34.09 they said, "Well this isn't the time", but if nobody answered
00:10:36.29 or only one person answered then they would go
00:10:39.16 to the house, break in, rob the house, and in some cases do far worse.
00:10:43.24 So she became rather scared from this set of phone calls,
00:10:50.17 and of course, about thirty minutes later
00:10:53.21 when the press couldn't reach anybody on the phone
00:10:56.02 or at least get any answers from what she was saying,
00:10:59.00 they came to the door, and started ringing the doorbell and banging on the door,
00:11:03.23 and she panicked and went under the bed and apparently hid under the bed
00:11:11.03 for about three hours before everybody left and she finally emerged.
00:11:15.17 At that point, she came out and she did what I told her to do
00:11:21.03 if there was any emergency, which was to call my mother in Chicago.
00:11:23.25 She called my mother. My mother explained what was going on and then things calmed down.
00:11:31.08 The next day was Tuesday, that was the day we were scheduled to go home,
00:11:38.26 and the day we did go home.
00:11:40.23 We drove from where we were in France to Geneva;
00:11:43.16 flew from there to Frankfurt; and then back to Boston.
00:11:46.14 And at both airports in Geneva and Frankfurt,
00:11:52.11 there were large numbers of international newspapers,
00:11:57.01 and my picture was in almost all of them from all over the world.
00:12:02.05 And my wife looking at this said, "Hey, maybe you can show this to the agent
00:12:09.02 at the desk and maybe because this is such a special day
00:12:13.13 they will give us an upgrade from coach class, economy,"
00:12:16.10 and I said, "Well, OK, we'll give it a go".
00:12:19.11 So my daughter opened up some of the newspapers,
00:12:22.18 and I took about half a dozen different newspapers open to a page of my picture,
00:12:26.18 went to the desk, talked to the agent, and explained the situation,
00:12:30.01 and said, "You know, is there any chance you could give,
00:12:32.24 because of this great celebratory day for us, any chance you could give us an upgrade?"
00:12:40.05 The agent thought about it, and she said,
00:12:42.12 "OK, I am going to upgrade all three of you to Business Class."
00:12:46.24 I was delighted, and my daughter was standing next to me, age 9,
00:12:51.12 coming up to about here, and she looks at the agent and says,
00:12:54.28 "Only Business Class!?"
00:12:58.14 and the agent looks back at her and says,
00:13:02.06 "Next time".
00:13:06.08 So, we flew back Business Class, very pleasant,
00:13:09.03 and then resumed what from there on out was not quite a normal life.
00:13:15.09 Thank you.

This Talk
Speaker: H. Robert Horvitz
Audience:
  • Researcher
Recorded: July 2007
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Have you ever wondered how scientists react when they discover that they have been awarded a Nobel Prize? Horvitz, one of the winners of the 2002 Prize for Medicine or Physiology, tells us where he was and what he did when he found out he had won.

Speaker Bio

H. Robert Horvitz

Robert Horvitz is a Professor in the Biology Department, the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Horvitz studies the development and behavior of C. elegans. His pioneering studies led to the identification of… Continue Reading

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