Being a scientist means knowing what it is like to fail, new Nobel laureate James Rothman from Yale University tells the Associated Press.
The difference between "a great scientist and a not-so-lucky one," Rothman says, is that a great scientist fails 99 percent of the time while an unlucky one fails 99.9 percent of the time.
Rothman also notes that he became a biochemist because he was rejected by Harvard's neuroscience program. "Turns out I became a pretty good biochemist," he says, according to the AP.
Rothman is in Stockholm where he, Randy Schekman from the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University's Thomas Südhof will be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine this week for their work on cell transport.
Südhof adds that in high school, he found science to be "pretty boring."