Rockefeller University’s Jeffrey Friedman is feeling pretty good about his career trajectory. Hot on the heels of winning the 2010 Lasker Prize for discovering the leptin gene, Friedman is being touted as a frontrunner for this year’s Nobel prize in medicine and physiology. It’s a lot of excitement in a very short period of time for research that took him close to a decade to complete. In the following video (shot earlier this week at his office in New York) Friedman tells Nature Medicine about the steps to Lasker — and possibly Nobel — greatness.