Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science by James D. Watson

felt good even though I lost most games. The relaxation that comes from strenuous exercise most likely reflects the physical-stress-mediated release of ß-endorphins, the opiate-like human molecules whose expression is evolution's way of ensuring that humans engage in tasks that promote our long-term well-being.
5. Late summer experiments go against human nature
    During the euphoria that comes with long June days, both hard work and hard play are possible. A full day of experiments in no way precludes early evening softball or volleyball games. But by early August, darkness creeps up on mealtime and yellow leaves begin to hint that fall is not that far away. So with the outside water temperature still rising to its early September highs, afternoon beach excursions make more sense than experiments easily put off to the next morning. The last weeks of August are usually best suited for vacations to distant places attractive enough that thoughts of science will fade no more than two or three days after arrival. Several-week vacations never hurt if you can afford them. And on beach walks toward the end of your vacation, your brain may even be sufficiently refreshed to mull over potential experiments you can undertake when back on home ground.

5. MANNERS PASSED ON TO AN ASPIRING YOUNG SCIENTIST
    U PON my return to the less intense intellectual atmosphere of IU in the fall of 1948, I began following up Luria's observations from 1941 that phages suspended in simple salt solutions are much more sensitive to inactivation by X-rays than those suspended in nutrient-rich beef broth solutions. Unclear was whether phages indirectly killed by exposure to reactive molecules generated by X-rays striking surrounding water molecules possessed novel properties not found in phages killed by “direct” X-ray hits. Luria's earlier inactivation curves suggested that several indirect hits were required to kill a phage. In contrast, direct killing was long thought to result from a single ionization event.
    While enjoying the first experiments of my own devising, I began anticipating the intellectual excitement that was to come from the impending mid-October weekend visit of Leo Szilard. Just turned fifty, Szilard was then a professor of biophysics and sociology at the University of Chicago, and was driven down by his much younger collaborator, Aaron Novick, also a participant in the 1947 Cold Spring Harbor phage course. Leo had recently received a small Rockefeller Foundation grant to support midwestern genetics meetings of his choosing. The barely five-foot-six Szilard invariably wore a tie with his suit, never trying to hide the potbelly that reflected his fondness for food and aversion to exercise.
    Born in Budapest in 1898 to prosperous parents, the extraordinarily intelligent Leo became a physicist in Berlin, where he knew Albert Einstein well and taught modern physics between 1925 and 1932 with Erwin Schrödinger. As a Jew, he had the good sense to flee Berlin the month Hitler assumed power. Soon he was in England, where the fast flow of his ideas was not so well suited to the more stately flow of English science. He seldom spent more than a few months in any one location, and so there never seemed to be enough time for his theoretical hunches to be experimentally tested. Moreover, his desire to seek patents for ideas that had commercial application made his English academic hosts think he valued money more than ideas. Here they were 100 percent wrong. It was only thanks to money from his German patents, one with Einstein, that Leo could afford to stay in science.
    No one in England, moreover, knew of the personal anguish attending his 1933 revelation in London that a nuclear disintegration releasing more neutrons than it consumed would unleash the great energy of the atom described by Einstein's famous E = me 2 equation. If the technique for creating such fission events were to fall into the hands of the Nazis, allowing them to build atomic