Age cannot whither nor custom stale the sharp tongue of "Honest
Jim" - the title the Nobel Prize - winning Watson (DNA: The Secret
of Life, 2003, etc.) originally wanted for The Double Helix, his
first tell-all account of science and personal history.Now in his
late 70s, Watson chronicles his life from birth through middle age.
We learn of a close-knit family and an early love of ornithology,
but the even greater appeal of genetics by the time of graduate
school. Watson's career took off as he began working with hot-shot
geneticists studying bacterial viruses (phages) like the future
Nobelists Salvador Luria and Max Delbruck. Indeed, the names of
Watson's mentors, peers and former graduate students read like a
Who's Who in molecular biology. They also underscore some of the
"remembered lessons" he adds to each chapter, e.g., "choose a young
thesis advisor"; "choose an objective apparently ahead of its
time." The main text deals with the years Watson taught at Harvard
and later when he became director of the Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory on Long Island, moving it from near bankruptcy to growth
and continued pre-eminence. Watson has certainly made his mark as
scientist, teacher, textbook writer, nurturer of talent and canny
administrator. But Honest Jim also made known his contempt for
mediocre faculty and administrators, and he lost a key battle in
trying to get Harvard to fund tumor virus studies - the Next Big
Thing in the '60s and '70s. Around that time, Jim, ever the nerd,
finally met and won the lovely Liz, a Radcliffe undergraduate who
married the 39-year-old bachelor in 1968. The chronicle ends
abruptly in the mid-'70s, save for a shocker of an epilogue 30
years later. Watson again confronts Harvard with the need to beef
up basic science only to face Larry Summers and later Derek Bok,
who had distinctly other ideas - though Watson does not fault
Summers for his conjecture on women in science.Vintage Watson:
brash, bumptious, brilliant - and never boring. (Kirkus Reviews)
`ames D. Watson looks back on his extraordinary and varied career -
from its beginnings as a schoolboy in Chicago's South Side to the
day he left Harvard almost 50 years later, world-renowned as the
co-discoverer of DNA - and considers the lessons he has learnt
along the way. The result is both an engagingly eccentric memoir
and an insightful compendium of lessons in life for aspiring
scientists. Watson's 'manners' range from those he learnt
bird-watching with his father during the Great Depression ('Avoid
fighting bigger boys and dogs' and 'Find a young hero to emulate')
to the manners appropriate for a Nobel Prize ('Have friends close
to those who rule'). He evokes his time as a graduate student in
the 1940s ('Hire spunky lab helpers'); the excitement of working in
DNA for the first time as well as having his first dates; his time
working as a White House advisor; and at Harvard in the '70s. Avoid
Boring People is a quirky, original, wise, and infuriatingly
un-put-downable blend of candid anecdotes and revealing insights
into the life of one of the greatest scientists of the 20th
century.
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