Peter Hotez, M.D., Ph.D.: What’s the best advice your mother ever gave you?

In honor of Mother’s Day, TMC News asked members of the Texas Medical Center community: What’s the best advice your mother ever gave you?

“My mother was incredibly supportive in anything I ever wanted to do. When this picture was taken, I was this nerdy little kid that used to run down to a brook near our house and I would bring up water and look at it under a microscope. One of the things my parents did for me was I really wanted a high-quality microscope and they were willing to make that investment. And so I wound up setting up a laboratory in my room in my home in West Hartford, Connecticut. But then when the smell started to get bad from all the pond scum, they asked me to move the lab down to the basement. My mother is now almost 90 and she lives in Bloomfield, Connecticut, and her most important words for me growing up were, ‘All you can do is your best.’ And those were always comforting words for me, to know that that is all a person can do in the end, and generally speaking, if people always try to do their best, they’ll come out ahead of the game.”

—PETER HOTEZ, M.D., PH.D.
Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, endowed chair in Tropical Pediatrics at Texas Children’s Hospital and director of Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development