The complexity of Gasser's dilemma is familiar to researchers. "Scientist-types, by their very nature, are ambitious and intellectual, [which means] they can, by their personality, worry a lot, create self-sabotaging thoughts, be impatient with themselves," says David Munz, a stress researcher at St. Louis University who periodically leads a program in stress management for scientists and other employees at Monsanto.
Indeed, University of California, Los Angeles, chemistry professor Donald Cram, a 1987 Nobel laureate in chemistry, credits the uncompromising--and often stress-inducing--standards he always held himself to as being instrumental to his success as a scientist. Even now, with a Nobel Prize and a bushel of other honors to his name, he refuses to lower his expectations. "I'm always running scared," Cram says. Whereas once it was the pressure to measure up to his peers that motivated him, now it's "beating out the younger people, surviving in a competitive atmosphere," that ...
