Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science Read Online Free PDF

very discreet, I got the impression that they were trying to develop a superweapon ahead of the Germans.
    A real plus of the college's evaluation system was that you could take your comprehensive exams as soon as you felt prepared. No requirements existed for attending classes or writing term papers. And the tuition was the same even if you registered for more than the normal course load. Because of the war, all the second years of physical sciences courses were crammed into the spring 1944 quarter. Once again I eked out a B on the final exam. I used the following summer quarter to cram down the one-year-long Biological Science Survey, which, happily, was not weighted down by the great-books historical approach. With my interest in birds drawing me toward a career in biology, I was disappointed when I got yet another B on the comprehensive exam that August.
    My progress toward a concentration in science did not reflect any dislike of the second-year surveys in the humanities or social sciences. In fact, both these classes left lasting memories of inspired teaching. Of all my instructors, the Trinity College-trained Irish classicist David Greene would bring me closest to Hutchins's idea of great teaching. Particularly moving was Greene's Humanities II lecture on the grand inquisitor of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov and the choice between freedom and the security offered by adherence to religious authority. I was also captivated by my Social Science II lectures, interspersed with discussion sessions led by the German-born refugee from Nazism Christian Mackauer. With his Continental background he was much at home pitting Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism against R. H. Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. It was a compelling new outlook on my father's Protestant heritage.
    In my first departmental science class, Botany 101, I was several years younger than the other students. The basics of plant anatomy and physiology were little more than an exercise in short-term memory. But the laboratory sessions were a horror since they demanded sketching what I saw under the microscope. My inability to draw, much less do so neatly, depressingly ensured that my final grade would be another B. Zoology 101, taught by the termite specialist Alfred Emerson, went much better: less drawing, and many trips to the Field Museum to look at its extensive collection of reptiles, birds, and mammals.
    I remained all through my college years a fervent ornithologist, especially during the spring and fall migrations, when I frequently went by myself, sometimes extending the reach of public transportation by hitchhiking, to prime birding areas. The birds that fascinated me the most were the shorebirds, ranging from the tiny sandpipers to the much larger curlews. I was always on the lookout for the very rare red Wilson and northern phalaropes that Dad had seen when he was a boy. So I was tremendously thrilled when one day in early May, in a marsh on the west shore of Lake Calumet, I spotted three northern phalaropes spinning in the shallow water.
    In the spring of 1945, I took the intellectually challenging physiology course taught by the clever Ralph Gerard, whose recent book, Unresting Cells, was one of our texts. The class was given in Abbott Hall, which was next to Billings Hospital and was the headquarters of the biochemistry and physiology departments. No longer did lab work depend on drawing. Instead we did actual experiments on frogs whose consciousness had been destroyed by the quick insertion of a sharpened metal rod into their brains. On other afternoons, teaching assistants did demonstrations on anesthetized dogs that had been brought down from the animal room on the top floor of Abbott. In summer months when the windows were open, the sounds of barking dogs reached the walks below, upsetting those who believed experimenting on animals to be morally irresponsible. In contrast I, like almost everyone I knew, saw