Harvard University Alumni

"We are using the strength of our global platform, and what we do in Services and other areas, to propel the relationship into the boardroom"

"That was a game-changing piece of advice for me, because then I started doing completely different jobs and ones that weren't necessarily logical to most people's thinking"

"We’ve taken some pretty tough talent calls, says Fraser. If someone was a strong performer, but their job had gone away in the reorg, we would put them into a job that someone else had"

"There was a lot of pride in some of these retail businesses and it has been hard to let go of them from a cultural point of view"

"That philosophy very much guided me to start thinking what are the things that would equip me better for a more senior role further down the path"

"We've been in the midsts of a health crisis, and if we didn't put our people's health and safety first and understand what's going on in their lives, honestly, I think we would have done a very poor job managing the bank through the crisis"

"Our employees have then rewarded us incredibly because, secure in that and knowing that they were going to be okay, then meant that they would focus on our clients and look after them too"

"We will invest in our infrastructure, risk management and controls to ensure that we operate in a safe and sound manner and serve our clients and customers with excellence"

"I knew it was going to be multiple years and I knew I had to get a move on: to be bold around it and take tough decisions that hadn’t been made before, and to make investments that were going to be hard for the bottom line for a couple of years but would then bear fruit"

"Our folk here are not shy about telling you what you need to do when you ask them"

"There is some crazy pressure on women, and on men, to almost be superwoman or superman, and that's just not realistic"

"We are not done and we’ve still got a way to go. There is no victory being declared, but there is very clear, demonstrable progress"

"If you move from 20 different ways of doing something to one, that reduces the risk of something going wrong enormously. Then you make sure that the process around that makes sense, end to end: making sure it isn’t convoluted and complex. You put in all your controls, both preventive, and detective. You try and make as many of them automated as possible, and then you test them constantly to make sure they’re working. That is the deeply unsexy but very important work we have been doing"

"Having experience of different parts of the bank gives you a lot of courage and conviction, to get clarity quickly about what needs to be done and stick to the plan, even if it’s difficult"

"If we didn't put our people's health and safety first ... I think we would have done a very poor job managing the bank"

"I didn’t know what my life would look like as a black postdoc or faculty member."

"Black women are a different story. But there were minority women working at the Fermilab experiments whom I was very happy to see. And at the ATLAS experiment there are a noticeable fraction of African descent. So I think things are improving because, historically, all of the icons in our field have been white men."

"Since I started working in high energy physics it certainly hasn't been lonely and there haven't been a lack of female role models."

"I looked to the women such as my mother who had had academic careers, and tried to think about how I could shape my life to look something like that, and I realized that it could be something I could make work."

"It's impossible for me to say what happens after the inauguration," she says. "This campaign has been planned for more than a year; it's coming out now."

"The language of medicine and science is being used to drive people to suicide. The mantle of concern for children is being claimed to destroy children's lives. We have to take a firmer stand on behalf of those who are being hurt."

"I started my pediatric residency program at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City in 1983,"That was before the HiB vaccine came out, which protects against a bacteria called Haemophilus Influenzae Type B. "We used to see so many children with very serious bacterial infections due to this bacteria — pneumonia, meningitis, sepsis. And after the vaccines came out and had been given for a number of years, we really no longer see those infections."

"When I heard about doctors in Italy having to ration ventilators and then the incredibly likely possibility that that is going to happen here, my first thought was so many Black people are going to die."

"John F. Fulton was one of the leading figures internationally in and history of medicine between the early 1930s and 1960. Working at the laboratory of physiology at Yale University, he was a pioneer in the study of the functional localisation of the cerebral cortex in primates. His 1938 treatise Physiology of the nervous system was a milestone in the development of neurophysiology. Fulton created a working environment at the laboratory where training was provided to important scientists who later directed centres in their home countries. He stood out as speaker, editor, communicator, and member of several committees, and established many links with foreign figures, including the Spanish physicians , Jaume Pi-Sunyer, , , and Francisco Guerra. Fulton was a student of and Harvey Cushing and showed a special interest for the world of Santiago Ramón y Cajal. A great bibliophile, he dedicated the last years of his short but intense life to the history of medicine, publishing studies on Michael Servetus."

"I was mystified one morning in an outpatient department by the numerous and vague complaints of an Italian boy—who, incidentally, neglected to mention his chief trouble—and in order to temporize he was told to return with a "24-hour specimen". The next morning he arrived in a Ford car with sundry members of his family and six jugs containing 20 litres of pale, clear ! I need scarcely remark that this was my first experience with ."

"Born of pioneering stock, with three generations of physicians behind him, it is not surprising that should turn the full force of his tremendous energies to charting a little known field — the human brain. After attending Yale College and , he went to the where, under the influence of , Osler and , he made himself eminent as a and as a leader in the reform of . Cushing was one of the earliest in the United States to use s; the first to take routinely during surgical operations and in general practice. The use of the in brain operations was first developed by him."

"I have chosen to place ... and ... side by side ... Both men were incredibly industrious., Osler's output running to 1,195 books and papers, as indicated in Maude Abbott's bibliography, ... while Choulant published sixty separate books (see Appendix IV); his journal contributions have never been counted or collected."

"As to the doctrine of slavery and the right of Christians to hold Africans in perpetual servitude, and sell and treat them as we do our horses and cattle, that (it is true) has been heretofore countenanced by the Province Laws formerly, but nowhere is it expressly enacted or established. It has been a usage — a usage which took its origin from some European nations and the regulations of the British government respecting the then Colonies, for the benefit of trade and wealth. But whatever sentiments have formerly prevailed in this particular or slid in upon us by the example of others, a different idea has taken place with the people of America, more favorable to the natural right of mankind, and to that natural, innate desire of Liberty, with which Heaven, (without regard to color, complexion or shape of noses, features) has inspired all the human race. And upon this ground our Constitution of Government, by which the people of this Commonwealth have solemnly bound themselves, sets out with declaring all men are born free and equal — and that every subject is entitled to liberty, — and to have it guarded by the laws, as well as life and property — and in short is totally repugnant to the idea of being born slaves. This being the case I think the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct and Constitution; and there can be no such thing as perpetual servitude of a rational creature, unless his liberty is forfeited by criminal conduct or given up by personal consent or contract."

"Recently I attended a workshop on the study of complexity at which two MIT computer scientists, Tom Toffoli and Norman Margolus, demonstrated the operation of an and gate on a computer monitor. Also watching the show was Charles Bennett of IBM, an expert on the mathematical foundations of computation and complexity. I remarked to Bennett that what we were watching was an electronic computer simulating a cellular automaton simulating a computer. Bennett replied that these successive embeddings of computational logic reminded him of Russian dolls."

"Throughout history philosophers and mystics have sought a compact key to universal wisdom, a finite formula or text which, when known and understood, would provide the answer to every question. The Bible, the Koran, the mythical secret books of Hermes Trismegistus, and the medieval Jewish Cabala have been so regarded. Sources of universal wisdom are traditionally protected from casual use by being hard to find, hard to understand when found, and dangerous to use, tending to answer more and deeper questions than the user wishes to ask. Like God the esoteric book is simple yet undescribable, omniscient, and transforms all who know It. The use of classical texts to foretell mundane events is considered superstitious nowadays, yet, in another sense, science is in quest of its own Cabala, a concise set of natural laws which would explain all phenomena. In mathematics, where no set of axioms can hope to prove all true statements, the goal might be a concise axiomatization of all “interesting” true statements."

"Ω is in many senses a Cabalistic number. It can be known of, but not known, through human reason. To know it in detail, one would have to accept its un-computable digit sequence on faith, like words of a sacred text. It embodies an enormous amount of wisdom in a very small space, inasmuch as its first few thousand digits, which could be written on a small piece of paper, contain the answers to more mathematical questions than could be written down in the entire universe, including all interesting finitely-refutable conjectures. Its wisdom is useless precisely because it is universal: the only known way of extracting from Ω the solution to one halting problem, say the Fermat conjecture, is by embarking on a vast computation that would at the same time yield solutions to all other equally simply-stated halting problems, a computation far too large to be carried out in practice. Ironically, although Ω cannot be computed, it might accidentally be generated by a random process, e.g. a series of coin tosses, or an avalanche that left its digits spelled out in the pattern of boulders on a mountainside. The initial few digits of Ω are thus probably already recorded somewhere in the universe. Unfortunately, no mortal discoverer of this treasure could verify its authenticity or make practical use of it."

"The notion that global warming is a fact and will be catastrophic is drilled into people to the point where it seems surprising that anyone would question it, and yet, underlying it is very little evidence at all. Nonetheless, there are statements made of such overt unrealism that I feel embarrassed. I feel it discredits science. I think problems will arise when one will need to depend on scientific judgment, and by ruining our credibility now you leave society with a resource of some importance diminished."

"We're talking of a few tenths of a degree change in temperature. None of it in the last eight years, by the way. And if we had warming, it should be accomplished by less storminess. But because the temperature itself is so unspectacular, we have developed all sorts of fear of prospect scenarios – of flooding, of plague, of increased storminess when the physics says we should see less. I think it's mainly just like little kids locking themselves in dark closets to see how much they can scare each other and themselves."

"Based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn't reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability—that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Niño, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc. Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false."

"With respect to science, the assumption behind consensus is that science is a source of authority and that authority increases with the number of scientists. Of course, science is not primarily a source of authority. Rather, it is a particularly effective approach to inquiry and analysis. Skepticism is essential to science; consensus is foreign."

"# Another trait of science that leads to much hostility or misunderstanding by the non-scientist is the fact that science is practiced by a small elite... (which) has cultural patterns discernibly different from those of the rest of society..."

"# The trait that to me seems the most socially important about science, however, is that it is a major source of man's discontent with the status quo..."

"# Moreover, the pace of technological advance gravely threatens the bountiful and restorative power of nature to resist modification..."

"is about the gravity of empty space, the gravity of the vacuum. And the vacuum is a concept that we address in and quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is physics on microscopic scales, while Einstein's theory of general relativity ... is physics on macroscopic scales. These two theories are both great, but they don't work together. We don't have what's called a quantum theory of gravity, the way the two are united. However, dark energy actually requires you to use both of these branches of physics. So our hope is that by observing how the universe actually does physics at that interface, we will learn how to unify those."

"Not only does it swallow anything that comes too near it but no one lives to tell the tale ... there are footprints leading in, and no footprints leading out ... If black holes weren’t real, I think the science-fiction writers would have wanted to invent them."

"I think . I never would have guessed it. Even as an undergraduate, once I’d learned a little physics, I would have thought that the universe was eternal, static, and always in equilibrium. So in graduate school when I found out that the universe was expanding, I was awestruck. Then I learned if we could measure the expanding universe, the way we record the growth of a child with marks on a doorframe ... , we could determine the age of the universe and predict its ultimate fate. This was staggering! I knew this is what I wanted to do. Since that time, charting the expanding universe to determine its nature has been my passion. Though I have to add: knowing what I know now, that the , I feel like King Alfonso X of Castile who saw Ptolemy’s and reportedly said “If the Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking on creation thus, I should have recommended something simpler.”"

"Today we are able to make very precise measurements of the by measuring the distances and s of . The shift in a supernova’s due to the expansion of space gives its redshift (z) and the relation between redshift and distance is used to determine the expansion rate of the universe. Supernovae with greater redshifts, lying at greater distances, reveal the past expansion rate as their light was emitted at an epoch when the universe was younger. Supernovae Type Ia were the suitable candidate for these measurements as you need objects that are very luminous (thus can be observed even when they are very far) and highly uniform (so that intrinsic scatter doesn't blur the signal). Supernovae Type Ia are the most luminous of the common supernova types, peaking at 4 billion , and thus allowing us to look at extreme large distances."

"The revealed the to have an unexpected richness of structure. Many of the observed features have now been identified as collective effects arising from the of the ring material. These effects include , the main topics of this review chapter. Both kinds of waves were first discussed in the astronomical literature in connection with the dynamics and structure of , and our discussion contrasts the similarities and differences between the and s. After developing the theory of free and forced waves of both types, we discuss how the observed waves can be used as diagnostics to obtain crucial parameters that characterize the physical state of the rings."

"The rich variety of stars live in our Galaxy mostly singly or in pairs ... Sometimes, however, hundreds or thousands of stars can be found in loose groups called s. The is a daily young open closer, and the which surrounds the famous "seven sisters" of this cluster attests to the fact that these stars must only recently have been born out of the surrounding gas and dust. The oldest stars in our Galaxy are found in tighter groups called s. Rich globular clusters may contain more than a million members."

"have played a prominent role in astronomical thought since the discovery by in 1845 of the spiral structure of the ... Through the work of , , , and especially Hubble, by the late 1920s, it became known, and not just speculated, that such spirals were disk-like stellar systems coequal to our own Milky Way system. From the optical study of the kinematics of stars in the solar neighborhood, (1927) and Jan Oort (1927) deduced that the flattening of the galactic disk is due to rotation, and that this rotation occurred differentially, with the stars near the galactic center taking less time to go once around the center than the material farther out."

"Less than a century ago we had no idea that there was more to the universe than our own Milky Way. the immense size of the universe, the fact that it is expanding, the fact that it is populated with such things as – all this and more had to be discovered before we could do the work that led us to contemplate an ."

"The legislation of Moses! Let me ask, what other legislation of ancient times is still exerting any influence upon the world? What philosopher, what statesman of ancient times can boast a single disciple now? What other voice comes down to us, over the stormy waves of time? But this man is at this day — at this hour — exerting a mighty influence over millions; the whole Hebrew nation do homage to his illustrious name. Though the daily sacrifice has ceased, and the distinction of the tribes is lost, though the temple has not left one stone upon another, and the altar-fires have been extinguished long ago, still, wherever a Jew is found, — and they are found wherever the foot of an adventurer travels, — he is a living monument of the power which this great Hebrew statesman still has over the minds and hearts of his countrymen. And now let us take one glance at this prophet, at the close of a life so laborious and honored. Up to his one-hundred-and-twentieth year, his eye was not dim, nor had his strength abated. But now, when he stands almost on the edge of the promised land, his last hour of mortal life has come. To conduct his people to that land had been his daily effort, and his nightly dream, and yet he is not permitted to enter it, though it would never have been the home of Israel, but for him. He ascends a mountain to die, and there the land of promise spreads out its romantic landscape at his feet. There is Grilead, with its deep valleys and forest-covered hills; there are the rich plains and pastures of Dan; there is Judah, with its rocky heights, and Jericho, with its palm-trees and rose-gardens; there is Jordan seen from Lebanon downward, winding over its yellow sands; the long blue line of the Mediterranean can be seen over the mountain battlements of the west. On this magnificent deathbed the Statesman of Israel breathed his last. Lest the gratitude which so often follows the dead, though denied to the living, should pay him Divine honors, they buried him in darkness and silence; and no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day."

"Having that bit of diabolical contrariness is a weird pleasure of being a scientist. You’re always trying to figure out, “OK, how could I be fooling myself into a wrong conclusion?” Because the more you get those things right, the more chances you have of catching the universe doing something that our brains never would’ve imagined. Scientists build out of what seems like a stance of weakness. So, one might think it’s terrible that scientists are always discovering new ways that they’re wrong, or it’s terrible that they’re only probabilistically sure of facts. But that’s really where scientists’ superpower has come from. We have been able to figure out amazing solutions to problems or surprises about the world. Much of that can be traced back to being willing to be wrong and being comfortable with finding the ways you’re wrong. And for this purpose, you want to build strong relationships with people who are going to tell you when you’re wrong, who will disagree with you, or who compete with you. They’re your best bet at figuring out where you’re making a mistake."

"A greater gain to the world...than all the growth of scientific knowledge is the growth of the scientific spirit, with its courage and serenity, its disciplined conscience, its intellectual morality, its habitual response to any disclosure of the truth."

"# Certainly we have seen spectacular changes in the concept of private property and of national borders as we have moved into the space age..."