"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

and animal, are made of little bricklike objects called 'cells'. . ."
"Listen," I said, impatiently, "I know all that; otherwise I wouldn't be in the
course. What is lecithin?"
"I don't know."
I had to report on papers along with everyone else, and the first one I was
assigned was on the effect of pressure on cells ­­ Harvey chose that topic for me because
it had something that had to do with physics. Although I understood what I was doing, I
mispronounced everything when I read my paper, and the class was always laughing
hysterically when I'd talk about "blastospheres" instead of "blastomeres," or some other
such thing.
The next paper selected for me was by Adrian and Bronk. They demonstrated that
nerve impulses were sharp, single­pulse phenomena. They had done experiments with
cats in which they had measured voltages on nerves.
I began to read the paper. It kept talking about extensors and flexors, the
gastrocnemius muscle, and so on. This and that muscle were named, but I hadn't the
foggiest idea of where they were located in relation to the nerves or to the cat. So I went
to the librarian in the biology section and asked her if she could find me a map of the cat.
"A map of the cat, sir?" she asked, horrified. "You mean a zoological chart!"
From then on there were rumors about some dumb biology graduate student who was
looking for a "map of the cat."
When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing
an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.
The other students in the class interrupt me: "We know all that!"
"Oh," I say, "you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you've
had four years of biology." They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that,
when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.
After the war, every summer I would go traveling by car somewhere in the United
States. One year, after I was at Caltech, I thought, "This summer, instead of going to a
different place, I'll go to a different field."
It was right after Watson and Crick's discovery of the DNA spiral. There were
some very good biologists at Caltech because Delbriick had his lab there, and Watson
came to Caltech to give some lectures on the coding systems of DNA. I went to his
lectures and to seminars in the biology department and got full of enthusiasm. It was a
very exciting time in biology, and Caltech was a wonderful place to be.
I didn't think I was up to doing actual research in biology, so for my summer visit
to the field of biology I thought I would just hang around the biology lab and "wash
dishes," while I watched what they were doing. I went over to the biology lab to tell them
my desire, and Bob Edgar, a young post­doc who was sort of in charge there, said he
wouldn't let me do that. He said, "You'll have to really do some research, just like a
graduate student, and we'll give you a problem to work on." That suited me fine.
I took a phage course, which told us how to do research with bacteriophages (a
phage is a virus that contains DNA and attacks bacteria). Right away I found that I was
saved a lot of trouble because I knew some physics and mathematics. I knew how atoms
worked in liquids, so there was nothing mysterious about how the centrifuge worked. I
knew enough statistics to understand the statistical errors in counting little spots in a dish.
So while all the biology guys were trying to understand these "new" things, I could spend