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My first attempts to transmit typhus to laboratory animals, including the smaller species of monkeys, had failed, as had those of my predecessors, for reasons which I can easily supply today.

Of all the problems which were open to me for study, typhus was the most urgent and the most unexplored. We knew nothing of the way in which contagion spread.

I finally demonstrated that typhus infection is not hereditary in the louse.

I was less successful in my attempts to effect preventive vaccination against typhus by using the virus and in trying to produce large quantities of serum using large animals.

I entered Harvard Medical School knowing nothing of research.

I did not want to become a poster child for yet another disease.

I did not find my studies particularly enthralling.

Just as the only reservoir for the typhus virus in nature is provided by man, so the only vector of infection is the louse. The bite of the louse is not virulent immediately after the infecting meal. It becomes so only towards the 7th day following infection.

I was diagnosed with Graves' disease, an illness of the thyroid gland. Instead of surgery, I was given radiation treatment.

My work is not about my life history. It's not about the story of my neurosis.