Włodzimierz Ptak on Life

"People spend unnecessarily high amounts of money on drugs or supplements that support immunity , meanwhile they do more harm to themselves by their way of life, for example by inadequate diet."

"I have peasant origins. It manufactures hardness. One of my grandfathers was a peasant, the other one was a foreman in a cigarette factory. I trained my mind whole life. For example, I studied poems by heart, ranging from Mickiewicz to Mayakovsky."

"He was born in Kraków and decided to tie his scientific path with this city, although he would be welcome by the most prestigious universities in the world, as evidenced by the twenty-five years of romance with Yale University, where he was a visiting professor. In spite of his age he does not slow down – he is still working scientifically, he publishes articles."

"At Yale, I initially continued research on the problems which I brought from Poland. Within a few months, I made five papers and then published them in the leading American and British magazines. They liked me, they came to the conclusion that Ptak is good and efficient. The head of the Department of Pathology was then Richard K. Gershon, would-be Nobel Prize winner, a Polish Jew in a third generation. He died of lung cancer in 1983, at the age of fifty. We were close friends; I spent the last months of his life with him. Sometimes, speaking with me, he joked: „You're too intelligent not to be Jewish."