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my mind that I wanted to do fundamental research rather than going into applied research, even though my Admiralty experience would have fit me for developmental work. But did I have the necessary ability?
    There was some doubt about this among my friends. Some thought I might do better at scientific journalism—perhaps, one of them suggested, I should attempt to join the staff of Nature , the leading scientific weekly. (I don’t know what the current editor, John Maddox, would think of this idea.) I consulted mathematician Edward Collingwood, under whom I had worked during the war. As always he was reassuring and helpful. He saw no reason why I should not succeed in pure research. I also asked my close friend Georg Kreisel, now a distinguished mathematical logician. I had run across him when he came, at the age of nineteen, to work in the Admiralty under Collingwood. Kreisel’s first paper—an essay on an approach to the problem of mining the Baltic, using the methods of Wittgenstein—Collingwood had wisely locked away in his safe. By this time I knew Kreisel well, so I felt his advice would be solidly based. He thought for a moment and delivered his judgment: ‘Tve known a lot of people more stupid than you who’ve made a success of it.”
    Thus encouraged, my next problem was to decide what subject to choose. Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice. This, as the sixties generation discovered later, only makes the decision more difficult. I brooded over this problem for several months. It was so late in my career that I knew I had to make the right choice the first time. I could hardly try one subject for two or three years and then switch to a radically different one. Whatever choice I made would be final, at least for many years.
    Working in the Admiralty, I had several friends among the naval officers. They were interested in science but knew even less about it than I did. One day I noticed that I was telling them, with some enthusiasm, about recent advances in antibiotics—penicillin and such. Only that evening did it occur to me that I myself really knew almost nothing about these topics, apart from what I had read in Penguin Science or some similar periodical. It came to me that I was not really telling them about science. I was gossiping about it.
    This insight was a revelation to me. I had discovered the gossip test—what you are really interested in is what you gossip about. Without hesitation, I applied it to my recent conversations. Quickly I narrowed down my interests to two main areas: the borderline between the living and the nonliving, and the workings of the brain. Further introspection showed me that what these two subjects had in common was that they touched on problems which, in many circles, seemed beyond the power of science to explain. Obviously a disbelief in religious dogma was a very deep part of my nature. I had always appreciated that the scientific way of life, like the religious one, needed a high degree of dedication and that one could not be dedicated to anything unless one believed in it passionately.
    By now I was delighted by my progress. I seemed to have found the pass through the interminable mountains of knowledge and could glimpse where I wanted to go. But I still had to decide which of the two areas—we would now call them molecular biology and neurobiology—I should choose. This proved to be much easier. I had little difficulty in convincing myself that my existing scientific background would be more easily applied to the first problem—the borderline between the living and the nonliving—and I decided without further hesitation that that would be my choice.
    It should not be imagined that I knew nothing at all of either of my subjects. After the war I had spent a lot of my spare time in background reading. The Admiralty had generously allowed me to go once or twice a week to seminars and courses in theoretical physics at University College