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science. Much later, when I read Linus Pauling’s General Chemistry , I found it enthralling. Even so I have never tried to master inorganic chemistry, and my knowledge of organic chemistry is still very patchy. I did enjoy the physics I was taught at school. There was a course in medical biology (the school had a Medical Sixth Form, which prepared pupils for the first Bachelor of Medicine exam), but it never occurred to me to learn about the standard animals of the course: the earthworm, the frog, and the rabbit. I think I must have picked up the elements of Mendelian genetics but I don’t think I was ever taught it at school.
    I played, or was compelled to play, numerous sports but was rather feeble at all of them except tennis. I managed to be on the school tennis team for my last two years there. When I left school I found I could no longer play it for amusement, so I gave it up and have hardly played it since.
    At the age of eighteen I went to University College, London. By that time my parents had moved from Northampton to Mill Hill, so that my younger brother could attend the school as a day boy. I lived at home, going to University College by bus and underground, the journey one way taking the better part of an hour. When I was twenty-one I obtained a second-class Honours degree in physics, with subsidiary mathematics. The teaching in physics had been competent but a shade old-fashioned. We were taught the Bohr theory of the atom, by then (the mid-1930s) quite out of date. Quantum mechanics was hardly mentioned until a very short course of six lectures at the end of the final year. In the same way, the mathematics I learned was what a previous generation of physicists had found useful. I was taught nothing of eigenvalues or group theory, for example.
    Physics has in any case changed beyond recognition since then. At that time there was not even a hint of quantum electrodynamics, let alone quarks or superstrings. Thus, although I was trained in what would now be regarded as historical physics, my current knowledge of modern physics is only at the Scientific American level.
    After the war I did teach myself the elements of quantum mechanics, but I have never had occasion to use it. Books on this subject were in those days often entitled Wave Mechanics. At that time they could be found at the Cambridge University library classified under “Hydrodynamics.” No doubt things are different now.
    Having obtained my Bachelor of Science degree, I started research at University College, under Professor Edward Neville da Costa Andrade, helped financially by my uncle, Arthur Crick. Andrade put me onto the dullest problem imaginable, the determination of the viscosity of water, under pressure, between 100° and 150° C. I lived in a rented apartment near the British Museum that I shared with an ex-school friend, Raoul Colinvaux, who was studying law.
    My main task was to construct a sealable, spherical copper vessel (to hold the water), with a neck that would allow for the expansion of the water. It had to be kept at a constant temperature and its decaying oscillations captured on film. I am no good at precise mechanical construction but I had the help of Leonard Walden, Andrade’s senior lab assistant, and an excellent staff in the laboratory workshop. I actually enjoyed making the apparatus, boring though it was scientifically, because it was a relief to be doing something after years of merely learning.
    These experiences may have helped me during the war, when I had to devise weapons, but otherwise they were a complete waste of time. What I had acquired, however indirectly, was the hubris of the physicist, the feeling that physics as a discipline was highly successful, so why should not other sciences do likewise? I believe this did help me when, after the war, I eventually switched to biophysics. It was a healthy corrective to the rather plodding, somewhat cautious attitude I often encountered when I began to mix with