What Mad Pursuit Read Online Free PDF

should go to Cambridge,” he said. “You’ll find your own level there.”
    The second person Massey told me to go to see was Maurice Wilkins. Massey smiled to himself as he said this, and I sensed that Maurice was in some way unusual. They had worked together on isotope separation at Berkeley for the atomic bomb. Wilkins had taken a job under his old boss, John Randall in the physics department at King’s College, London, and I went there to see him in the basement rooms in which they all worked.
    Randall had persuaded the MRC that they should support the entry of physicists into biology. During the war scientists had acquired much more influence than they had had before it. It was not difficult for Randall, one of the inventors of the magnetron (the crucial development in military applications of radar), to argue that just as physicists had had a decisive influence on the war effort, so they could now turn their hands to some of the fundamental biological problems that lay at the foundations of medical research. Thus there was money available for “biophysics,” and the MRC had set up one of its research units at King’s College, with Randall as its director.
    Exactly what biophysics was, or could usefully become, was less clear. At King’s they seemed to feel that an important step would be to apply modern physical techniques to biological problems. Wilkins had been working on a new ultraviolet microscope, using mirrors rather than lenses. Lenses would have had to have been made of quartz, since ordinary glass absorbs ultraviolet light. Exactly what they hoped to discover with these new instruments was less clear, but the feeling was that any new observations made would inevitably lead to new discoveries.
    Most of their work involved looking at cells rather than molecules. At this time the full power of the electron microscope had yet to be developed, so observing cells meant accepting the relatively low resolving power of the light microscope. The distance between atoms is more than a thousand times smaller than the wavelength of visible light. Most viruses are far too tiny to be seen in an ordinary high-powered microscope, except perhaps as a minute spot of light against a dark background.
    In spite of Maurice’s enthusiasm and his very friendly explanations, I was not entirely convinced that this was the right way to go. However, at this stage I knew so little of my new subject that I could form only very tentative opinions. I was mainly interested in the borderline between the living and the nonliving, wherever that was, and most of the work at King’s seemed rather far on the biological side of that border.
    Perhaps the most useful result of this initial contact was my continued friendship with Maurice. We both had somewhat similar scientific backgrounds. We even looked somewhat alike. Many years later, upon seeing a photograph of Maurice in a textbook that was somewhat confusingly labeled (it was next to one of Jim Watson), a young woman in New York mistook it for one of me, though I was standing in front of her at the time. At one stage I even wondered if we might be distantly related, since my mother’s maiden name was Wilkins, but if we are cousins we must be very distant ones. More to the point, we were both of a similar age and traveling the same scientific path from physics to biology.
    Maurice did not seem especially unusual to me. Even if I had known, say, that he had a taste for Tibetan music, I doubt if I would have considered that odd. Odile (who became my second wife) thought he was rather strange because when he first arrived for dinner at her apartment in Earl’s Court he went straight into the kitchen and lifted the lids of the saucepans to see what was cooking. She had become accustomed to dealing with naval officers, and they never did things like that. After she discovered that this was not the impertinent curiosity of a hungry man—scientists seemed to be curious about such odd