Microbial biofilms: e pluribus unum

good guide. Arnold Steinhardt, the violinist, recounts that after the inaugural performance by his string quartet (the Guarnari) they were visited backstage by Rudolf Serkin. The pianist said, “The last time I heard Mozart played like that was in Vienna — and that is why I left.” And perhaps the hardest lesson to accept is that, unless it’s a thesis exam or something of the sort, your audience really doesn’t care how hard you worked to get to your answer. Frank Stahl once said to me that most experiments are just forays to teach you how to do the right one. One good experiment is worth ten messy ones. So if you have something to say, say it simply and directly — you’ll make a better impression than if you feel obligated to say everything and bits of nothing all at one time. “Science strives to make the new intelligible in terms of the familiar” — Nietszche. But there is no lingua franca, and everyday terms mean one thing to some of us, and something else to others. Writing is even harder than speaking — unless you are a master, there are no rhythms, inflections, and half sentences to steer the reader along. There is the constant tension between being communicative and being strictly correct — we sometimes have to ‘lie the truth’. This does not mean that the best of us speak or write the same way. I think of two inspirations of opposite styles: Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod on one hand, and Al Hershey on the other. Jacob and Monod, Cartesians at heart, seemed to invent the world before they stooped to discover it; whereas Hershey took us through the nitty gritty — such as the drama of DNA folding and unfolding — as though it were happening before our very eyes, and thereby revealed a world. I would read both with exhilaration, thinking that what I wanted was to do some experiment that would enable me to find a voice so that I could write — speak — like that.