I'm not guaranteeing that if you work hard you'll be able to duplicate my success. But in America, if you work hard, you just might. I'm a perfect example of that.
What attracted me to immunology was that the whole thing seemed to revolve around a very simple experiment: take two different antibody molecules and compare their primary sequences. The secret of antibody diversity would emerge from that. Fortunately at the time I was sufficiently ignorant of the subject not to realise how naive I was being.