What Mad Pursuit Read Online Free PDF Page B

things—but simply that Maurice was interested in cooking, she looked at him in a new light.
    My next problem was to decide what to work on and, at least as important, where to do it. I first explored the possibility of working at Birkbeck College in London with the X-ray crystallographer J. D. Bernal. Bernal was a fascinating character. One can get a vivid idea of him by reading C. P. Snow’s early science novel The Search , since the character Constantine is obviously based on Bernal. It is amusing to note that, in the novel, Constantine wins fame and an F.R.S. by discovering how to synthesize proteins, though Snow wisely didn’t indicate exactly what the process was. The plot of the novel turns on the setting up of a biophysics institute, while the final incident concerns the narrator deciding not to expose a fellow scientist for falsifying results and instead to give up his own career in science and become a writer, an incident I suspect modeled on something similar in Snow’s career.
    When I visited Bernal’s laboratory I was discouraged by his secretary, Miss Rimmel, an amiable dragon. “Do you realize,” she said, “that people from all over the world want to come to work with the professor? Why do you think he would take you on?” But a more serious difficulty was Mellanby, who said the MRC could not support me if I worked with Bernal. They wanted to see me doing something more biological. I decided to take A. V. Hill’s advice and try my luck at Cambridge, if someone there would have me.
    I visited the physiologist Richard Keynes, who talked to me as he ate his sandwich lunch in front of his experiment. He was working on ion movement in the giant axon of the squid. I talked to the biochemist Roy Markham, who showed me an interesting result he had recently obtained with a plant virus. Typically he described it in such a cryptic manner (I was not yet familiar with the way nucleic acid absorbed ultraviolet light) that I could not at first grasp what he was telling me. Both were helpful and friendly but neither had any space to offer me. Finally I visited the Strangeways Laboratory, headed by Honor Fell, where they did tissue culture. She introduced me to Arthur Hughes. They had had a physicist at the Strangeways—D. E. Lea—but he had died recently and his room was still vacant. Would I like to work there? The MRC agreed and gave me a studentship. My family also helped me financially so that I had enough to live in lodgings and still had some money to buy books.
    I stayed at the Strangeways for the better part of two years. While I was there I worked on a problem they were interested in. Hughes had discovered that chick fibroblasts in tissue culture could engulf, or phagocytose, small crumbs of magnetic ore. Inside the cell these tiny particles could be moved by an applied magnetic field. He suggested I use their movements to deduce something about the physical properties of the cytoplasm, the inside of the cell. I was not deeply interested in this problem but I realized that in a superficial way it was ideal for me, since the only scientific subjects I was fairly familiar with were magnetism and hydrodynamics. In due course this led to a pair of papers, one experimental and one theoretical, in Experimental Cell Research —my first published papers. But the main advantage was that the work was not too demanding and left me plenty of time for extensive reading in my new subject. It was then that I began in a very tentative way to form my ideas.
    Some time during this period I was asked to give a short talk to some research workers who had come to the Strangeways for a course. I recall the occasion vividly, since I tried to describe to them what the important problems in molecular biology were. They waited expectantly, with pens and pencils poised, but as I continued they put them down. Clearly, they thought, this was not serious stuff, just useless speculation. At only one point did they make any notes, and