Elementary , my dear Watson , the clue is in the genes . . . or is it ?

THE SEEMINGLY LIGHT-HEARTED, yet in fact serious, title of my lecture requires some explanation. This lecture celebrated the Centenary of the British Psychological Society, hosted by the British Academy (whose centenary is but one year later). The British Academy covers both the Humanities (Archaeology, Modern Languages, Literature, History, Theology, Philosophy, etc.) and the Social Sciences (Law, Economics, Social Anthropology, Geography, Sociology, Politics, Psychology, etc.). Even the Psychology Section of the Academy covers a wide range of disciplines: social psychology, cognitive psychology, adult neuropsychology, health psychology, emotional psychology, primate cognition, etc. And my own speciality—developmental cognitive neuroscience—is probably one of the furthest from the Humanities. So the problem the lecture posed was to link my interest in genotype/phenotype relations with the interests of these other disciplines, and the name ‘Watson’ came to mind. On the science side: James Watson contributed to the discovery of the structure of DNA in the 1950s and, half a century later, to the sequencing of the human genome. On the humanities side: although Arthur Conan Doyle is hardly one of Britain’s greatest literary figures, the sidekick of his famous character, Sherlock Holmes, is also called Watson. In fact, the