Not a boring review !
December 21, 2007
Sydney Brenner reviews Jim Watson’s “Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science / And Other Lessons from a Life in Science” in the Nov 23 issue of Science. Writing about the recent Watson episode, Brenner says:
” [..] But this and the Summers episode go much more deeply than the display of bad manners, for which one can always apologize. The Greeks had a word for it: hubris, the self-confidence and arrogance that always leads to disastrous retribution. If Euripides were with us, he would have said “Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first expose to the public press.”
The review is wonderful and has all the characteristic wit and humour that typifies Syd Brenner. Another gem:
The Human Genome Project, which Jim led in its early years, has had one bad–one might say, boring–consequence in generating factory science that I have called “low input, high throughput, no output” biology.
