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during my working hours. Sometimes I would sit at my desk at the Admiralty and surreptitiously read a textbook on organic chemistry. I remembered from my school days a little about hydrocarbons, and even about alcohols and ketones, but what were amino acids? In Chemical and Engineering News I read an article by an authority who prophesied that the hydrogen bond would be very important for biology—but what was it? The author had an unusual name—Linus Pauling—but he was quite unknown to me. I read Lord Adrian’s little book on the brain and found it fascinating. Also Erwin Schroedinger’s What Is Life? It was only later that I came to see its limitations—like many physicists, he knew nothing of chemistry—but he certainly made it seem as if great things were just around the corner. I read Hinshelwood’s The Bacterial Cell but could make little of it. (Sir Cyril Hinshelwood was a distinguished physical chemist, later President of the Royal Society and a Nobel Prize winner.)
    In spite of all this reading, I must emphasize that I had only a very superficial knowledge of my two chosen subjects. I certainly had no deep insight into either of them. What attracted me to them was that each contained a major mystery—the mystery of life and the mystery of consciousness. I wanted to know more exactly what, in scientific terms, those mysteries were. I felt it would be splendid if I finally made some small contribution to their solution, but that seemed too far away to worry about.
    At this point a crisis suddenly arose. I was offered a job! Not a mere studentship, but an actual job. Hamilton Hartridge, a distinguished but somewhat maverick physiologist, had persuaded the Medical Research Council to set up a small unit for him, to work on the eye. He must have heard I was looking for an opening because he asked me to come to see him. I hastily read his wartime paper on color vision—as I recall, he believed, from his work on the psychology of vision, that there were probably seven types of cones in the eye, not the traditional three. The interview went well and he offered me the job. My problem was that only the week before I had decided that my new field of work was to be molecular biology, not neurobiology.
    The decision was a hard one. Finally I told myself that my preference for the living-nonliving borderline had been soundly based, that I would have only one chance to embark on a new career, and that I should not be deflected by the accident of someone offering me a job. Somewhat reluctantly, I wrote to Hartridge and told him that, attractive though it was, I must refuse his offer. Perhaps it was just as well because though I found him a lively and engaging character, he seemed to me a little too bouncy and I was not completely sure we would get on. I also doubt if he would have been very understanding if my work had shown his ideas wrong, as time has proved them to be.
    My next task was to find some way of entering my new subject. I went around to University College to see Massey, under whom I had worked during the war, to explain my position and to ask for his help. His first guess when I told him I intended to leave the Admiralty was that I wanted him to get me a job in atomic energy (as it was then called), on which he had worked in Berkeley during the latter stages of the war. He looked surprised when I told him of my interest in biology, but he was very helpful and gave me two valuable introductions. The first was to A. V. Hill, also at University College, a Cambridge physiologist who had made for himself a solid reputation studying the biophysics of muscle, especially the thermal aspects of muscular contraction. For this he had been awarded a Nobel Prize in 1922. He liked the idea that I also should become a biophysicist and perhaps, eventually, work on muscle. He arranged an introduction to Sir Edward Mellanby, the powerful secretary of the Medical Research Council (the MRC). He also gave me some advice. “You