"Ричард Фейнман. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!/Вы, конечно, шутите, мистер Фейнман! (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автораFlaubert's book, a dull country doctor who had some idea of how to fix club
feet, and all he did was screw people up. I was similar to that unpracticed surgeon. The other work on the phage I never wrote up - Edgar kept asking me to write it up, but I never got around to it. That's the trouble with not being in your own field: You don't take it seriously. I did write something informally on it. I sent it to Edgar, who laughed when he read it. It wasn't in the standard form that biologists use - first, procedures, and so forth. I spent a lot of time explaining things that all the biologists knew. Edgar made a shortened version, but I couldn't understand it. I don't think they ever published it. I never published it directly. Watson thought the stuff I had done with phages was of some interest, so he invited me to go to Harvard. I gave a talk to the biology department about the double mutations which occurred so close together. I told them my guess was that one mutation made a change in the protein, such as changing the pH of an amino acid, while the other mutation made the opposite change on a different amino acid in the same protein, so that it partially balanced the first mutation - not perfectly, but enough to let the phage operate again. I thought they were two changes in the same protein, which chemically compensated each other. That turned out not to be the case. It was found out a few years later by people who undoubtedly developed a technique for producing and detecting the mutations faster, that what happened was, the first mutation was a mutation in which an entire DNA base was missing. Now the "code" was shifted and could not be "read" any more. The second mutation was either one in code could be read again. The closer the second mutation occurred to the first, the less message would be altered by the double mutation, and the more completely the phage would recover its lost abilities. The fact that there are three "letters" to code each amino acid was thus demonstrated. While I was at Harvard that week, Watson suggested something and we did an experiment together for a few days. It was an incomplete experiment, but I learned some new lab techniques from one of the best men in the field. But that was my big moment: I gave a seminar in the biology department of Harvard! I always do that, get into something and see how far I can go. I learned a lot of things in biology, and I gained a lot of experience. I got better at pronouncing the words, knowing what not to include in a paper or a seminar, and detecting a weak technique in an experiment. But I love physics, and I love to go back to it. ---- Monster Minds While I was still a graduate student at Princeton, I worked as a research assistant under John Wheeler. He gave me a problem to work on, and it got hard, and I wasn't getting anywhere. So I went back to an idea that I had had earlier, at MIT. The idea was that electrons don't act on themselves, they only act on other electrons. |
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