Remembrance of things past … Reading

For more than twenty years, I shared an office with Francis Crick, beginning in one large room in the Austin wing of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, where we also had five other people at their desks and, for a short while, some of our lab dishwashing. In 1959, we moved to a small room with two desks in a hut and this was followed by a succession of two other offices in the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. I am a paper hoarder and, with each of the moves, I would sweep everything into cardboard boxes that I always promised myself I would unpack and sort as soon as I had settled in the new office. But I never quite accomplished this. This collection of boxes, now alarmingly large, is still with me, partly in storage, and often in the original boxes and folders, now brown and crumbling with age. It is there waiting for me to retire again so I can devote myself to putting my papers in order. Among these papers are large items that have always surfaced to the top of the pile because they did not quite fit into the boxes. There is a copy of the map of the rII locus of bacteriophage T4, which once covered an entire wall of my room in Kings’ College and a roll of drawings of all the possible ways the bases might pair in two-stranded, three-stranded and four-stranded DNA molecules. There is also a large placard on which are emblazoned in large black letters the words: READING ROTS THE MIND. This appeared some time in the mid-1960s and for years was displayed on the wall behind Francis’s desk where he could always be seen avidly reading everything he could lay his hands on. This is, of course, an exaggeration, because Francis also spent a considerable time talking to people; our office sharing was successful because I spent most of my time in the lab or in the coffee room, and used my desk and the blackboards in our office only for discussions with Francis. I was asked the other day where the words on the sign came from. Although the message sounds like Dr Johnson, despite neither beginning nor concluding with ‘Sir’, I recently learnt that it had been invented by a friend, Christopher Longuet-Higgins, who was, at the time, a theoretical chemist and a good mathematician. He believed in the admonition and presumably thought that reading other people’s theories would corrupt you and prevent you from thinking about your own. However, biology is very different from mathematics, and reading is absolutely essential. It is a subject abounding with facts, all of which need to be known and understood. In our joint office there were to be found folders of reprints and notes on a large variety of subjects. The contents of the folder would be read and read and read again and notes written until the subject was mastered. Thus, I can remember — and indeed still possess — folders of papers on DNA winding, heterogeneous nuclear RNA, chromatin, the C-paradox, optic nerve regeneration, the papers of Hubel and Wiesel, computation theory, and so on. Some of these bouts of reading actually resulted in new research and often, in Francis’s case, in papers. After a long period of preoccupation with DNA winding, which involved not only a considerable amount of reading but also a voluminous correspondence with a number of mathematicians who had become interested in the subject, Francis produced a simple version of what he was working on with the title DNA Winding for Bird Watchers — an allusion to a friend of ours who was thought to be a suitable audience. I bet you that this is still in one of those boxes. It was in those days that I discovered the best way of approaching a new subject, which I still use today. You go to a library with an exercise book and pick up the past five years of the Annual Review of Genetics, or of whichever area is the most relevant to you. Scan the indexes and you are bound to find at least one article that will introduce you to the area. Read it and note, in your book, the references that are the most interesting. (It is fatal to copy the review because you will never read it.) You have to select these references stringently because when you read them they will give you more references, and the amount of reading can grow explosively. My readers, probably browsing this page on their screens, will find this all old-fashioned and will no doubt be able to tell me about more electronic ways of doing this on the internet. But all of that information is so ephemeral. It leaves nothing for one to worry about when one retires. When Francis went to America, I salvaged everything from the office including the sign. In 1977, I visited him in his grand office in the Salk Institute. Every surface was covered with piles of books and folders of papers on neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, psychology — in fact, everything to do with Francis’s new interests in the brain. The only thing missing was the sign, READING ROTS THE MIND. R115