James Watson is not just smart, he’s wicked smart (as we mainers would say) and yet he’s as down to earth as he could be. It was wonderful to hear the man in person, speaking at the Farfel Lecture last night at the University of Houston. Particularly gratifying was the revelation that Nobel Prize winners can be bad a math (he thinks a C in Calculus kept him out of CalTech), and he attributes much of his success not to great intellectual prowess (although we can assume) but to his ability to get along with people like Francis Crick. In another funny and eye-opening account, he told of Lawrence Bragg’s desire to get rid of Crick, thwarted only by the fact that at 35, Crick still hadn’t completed his PhD. More poignant was his discussion of Rosalind Franklin whom he seemed to believe would have discovered the structure of DNA herself if she had been more open to the kind of collaborative relationship he and Crick shared. He returned to that theme in the question and answer period in which his principle advice to anyone who was engaged in research was to find a partner, someone to bounce ideas off, someone to disabuse one of ones conceits and prejudices.
A note on the Farfel Lectures, the U of H PR department is apparently big on whisper-campaigns and I only found out about Watson’s talk through a Google News alert from some medical journal, but I have since discovered the UH Newsroom buried on the website. Coming up soon… Cornel West. They also let you know about the latest 5% tuition hike… guess they’ve got to pay for all those new buildings somehow.
