Keynote Speaker discusses the science of discovery. Dr. Garret FitzGerald, a.k.a. “Big G” as faculty and students sometimes call him according to a 2001 Penn Medicine article, is a humble man with a proclivity for speaking about his research in equal medical and metaphoric terms. He fell into medicine through “a series of accidents” he thinks, though his earnest quest for knowledge is anything but. Born and bred in Graystones, Co. Wicklow, he went to high school at a time when specialization in either the arts or the sciences wasn’t required as it is now. His grandfather had been a professor of Greek, he says, “So I did Greek and Latin and French and German and English and Irish,” but also rounded out his linguistics with and math and physics. It’s clear his secondary school studies have stayed with him.