Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [133]
p. 165 ‘Much of a scientist’s pride and sense of accomplishment’: P. Medawar, ‘The Act of Creation’, The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 41 (first published in New Statesman, 19 June 1964).
p. 165 Take the story of the transistor, for example: For the full tale, only sketched in this section, read M. Riordan and L. Hoddeson, Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age (Norton, 1997).
p. 169 ‘He set extraordinarily high standards for everyone, including himself …’: ‘Memorial Resolution: William B. Shockley (1910–1989)’, available at http://histsoc.stanford.edu/pdfmem/ShockleyW.pdf
p. 169 Isaac Newton and Friedrich Gauss, who both waited twenty years for recognition and acceptance: D. Watson, Scientists Are Human (Arno Press, 1975), p. 57.
p. 169 ‘When a true genius appears in this world …’: J. Swift, ‘Essay on the Fates of Clergymen’ (1728).
p. 170 ‘A conviction of the fundamental soundness of the idea took root in my mind’: http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/wegener.html
p. 170 Sir John Lubock described it as ‘nothing but nonsense’: D. Ebbing and S. Gammon, General Chemistry (Houghton Mifflin, 2008), p. 199.
p. 171 ‘just an old bag who’d been hanging around Cold Spring Harbor for years’: Barbara McClintock’s difficult journey is chronicled in E. Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism (Freeman, 1983).
p. 171 MRSA, for instance, contributed to the death of around 13,000 Britons between 1993 and 2009: UK Office for National Statistics, details available at http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1067
p. 174 The science writer Matt Ridley has an interesting way to describe chromosomes: M. Ridley, Genome (Harper Perennial, 2004), p. 6.
p. 174 by 1951 McClintock was able to publish a stab at what was going on: B. McClintock, ‘Chromosome Organization and Genic Expression,’ Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology, vol. 16, p. 40 (1951).
p. 175 ‘This became painfully evident to me …’: The National Library of Medicine has collected McClintock’s letters and papers at http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/LL/
p. 176 ‘Research uses real egotists who seek their own pleasure …’: A. SzentGyörgyi, Science Today, May 1980, p. 35.
p. 176 ‘I just go my own pace here’: quoted in L. Kass, ‘Records and Recollections: A New Look at Barbara McClintock, Nobel-PrizeWinning Geneticist’, Genetics, vol. 164, p. 1251 (August 2003).
p. 177 the French geneticists François Jacob, André Lwoff and Jacques Monod won their Nobel Prize: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1965/
p. 177 ‘their thinking was probably much influenced by Barbara’s notion’: This and the following quote are from N. Comfort, ‘From Controlling Elements to Transposons: Barbara McClintock and the Nobel Prize’, Trends in Genetics, vol. 17, p. 475 (2001).
p. 177 The first drafts of her acceptance speech: These are in the National Library of Medicine collection of McClintock’s papers (see Note for p. 175).
p. 178 ‘I was not invited to give lectures or seminars …’: This quote is from McClintock’s Banquet Speech, available at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1983/mcclintock-speech.html
p. 179 the sentiment expressed by the French physiologist Claude Bernard: C. Bernard et al., Introduction to Experimental Medicine (Dover Publications, 1957), p. 227.
p. 180 In July 2010, Nobel manoeuvrings came to the fore: Z. Merali, ‘Physicists Get Political over Higgs’, Nature News, http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100804/full/news.2010.390.html
p. 180 The problem is one of priority: Ian Sample, author of Massive: The Hunt for the God Particle (Virgin Books, 2010), has laid out the issues and the chronology at http://www.iansample.com/site/?q=content/higgs-row-and-nobel-reform
p. 181 ‘Anyone who witnesses the advance of science first-hand …’: C. Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (Ballantine, 1996), p. 255.
p. 182 that much is clear from reading