I'm not a politician, I'm not an economist. I'm just a simple Brian surgeon and a scientist who's trying to do my best every day.

You know how in sports baseball players, they hit home runs. Football players, they throw and they score touchdowns. I get to do something that very few people get to do - I get to touch the human brain, and every day I get to hit home runs, I get to score touchdowns.

If you look at some of the clips of me in the operating room, I sit in the chair, I control the microscope with my mouth, I connect, my hands are always working in the brain, my feet are controlling everything.

I'm not a politician, I'm not an economist. I'm just a simple Brian surgeon and a scientist who's trying to do my best every day.

The same skills that I used as a welder, as a migrant farm worker, are similar skills that I'm using as a brain surgeon.

As a researcher at US Berkeley I used to go into the brains of small, little animals and study the way that brains were connected and how little did I know that one day that was going to be my future - exploring the universe of the brain and hold it in between my hands and look at cells migrating.

The greatest gratification that I get to work with these hands is that when I come out and I go to the waiting room and speak and talk to the families of my patients, I get standing ovations and I get tears and they look at me as superhuman and superhero. No amount of money, no amount of anything can ever compare to that feeling.