From Failure to Success

Great quote by Stanford professor Euan Ashley (an expert on precision medicine) in opening his Lancet book review of Siddhartha Mukherjee's "The Gene, An Intimate History."  Here.

Probably the biggest take away from
Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Gene: An
Intimate History is that we might all
have made a greater impact on the
world had we failed more exams. As
Mukherjee describes in this follow-up
to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Emperor
of All Maladies, Charles Darwin left
Edinburgh medical school unable to
stomach the blood and screaming,
tutors of Sir Ronald Fisher, the
forefather of statistical genetics, were
sorely disappointed in his abilities, and
John Gurdon, who later won a Nobel
Prize in Physiology or Medicine, once
came 250th out of a class of 250 in a
biology exam at Eton College.

For a 1968 expression of the same idea, here.