"Pursuit of My Dreams for Half-a-Century"

Professor Ei-ichi Negishi, 2010 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry

The statistical odds of winning a Nobel Prize may be estimated to be 1/10,000,000 or 1/10⁷. One way of looking at this infinitesimally small figure is to think of it as winning “one-in-ten” competitions seven times in a row. For example, as one of the top few in a class of a few hundred students, you may already be 1/10² or so. Your competition level must continuously move up. After winning the fifth- or sixth-level competition, you may already be vying for a Nobel Prize or something equivalent to it in some other area. In this lecture, I shall reminisce how I might have climbed up seven steps of increasingly challenging competitions over 75 years to be finally recognized with a 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.