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

some other experiment. I said, "Hell, I'll just give you the ribosomes we've got. We have
plenty of them in my refrigerator at the lab."
It would have been a fantastic and vital discovery if I had been a good biologist.
But I wasn't a good biologist. We had a good idea, a good experiment, the right
equipment, but I screwed it up: I gave her infected ribosomes ­­ the grossest possible
error that you could make in an experiment like that. My ribosomes had been in the
refrigerator for almost a month, and had become contaminated with some other living
things. Had I prepared those ribosomes promptly over again and given them to her in a
serious and careful way, with everything under control, that experiment would have
worked,, and we would have been the first to demonstrate the uniformity of life: the
machinery of making proteins, the ribosomes, is the same in every creature. We were
there at the right place, we were doing the right things, but I was doing things as an
amateur ­­ stupid and sloppy.
You know what it reminds me of? The husband of Madame Bovary in Flaubert'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 which an extra base was put back in, or two more were taken
out. Now the 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