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I was sure I was going to be a doctor of global health or tropical medicine in some underdeveloped country.

I am a scientist. Mine is a professional world that achieves great things for humanity.

I'm a physician. I've been blessed with ideas and resources to use technology to make the world a better place. That's what I would like to leave behind.

I am sure that I have been much more useful to society as a medical physicist.

I think we learn from medicine everywhere that it is, at its heart, a human endeavor, requiring good science but also a limitless curiosity and interest in your fellow human being, and that the physician-patient relationship is key; all else follows from it.

My own career reflects a strange dichotomy between the world we've long known and the world that will become.

I think that we're beginning to globalize medicine now. You have to take Eastern approaches and bring them to the West, and share West with the East.

As 17th U.S. Surgeon General, I was privileged to serve as the nation's doctor. I focused much of my time on promoting proven programs and individual steps that lead to good health.

I think that one of the main privileges of what I do, which I am just starting to learn, is to have the ability to travel all over the world and experience different cultures.