With today’s announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature, it’s a good time to meet Peter Doherty Australia’s Nobel Prize for Medicine winner.
In his autobiographical essay about receiving the prize Doherty talks about how literature has influenced some of the most important decisions in his life. He was “influenced early on by reading Arthur Koestler and Edward de Bono, and more recently by the writings of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn”.
When the time came to decide what to do at university, Doherty “was reading Aldous Huxley, Jean Paul Sartre and Ernest Hemingway simultaneously. I decided to be the man of action rather than the philosopher”.
Doherty went on to write his own book, The Beginner’s Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize, offering advice to young scientists on how to live more experimentally and take more risks in their research.