
Master of the Game (1998) - mr_tyzic
http://crick.com/gamemaster.html
======
GuiA
_His father, along with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, won the 1962 Nobel
Prize for medicine by solving another very complex puzzle: the double-helix
structure of DNA molecules.

Crick left home in Northampton, England, in the early 1960s to follow in his
father's footsteps. He entered Harvard Medical School's neurophysiology
program for his doctorate.

Then his life took a twist.

Crick fell in with a group of computer programmers at MIT, dropped out of the
neurophysiology program and got a job with a computer company.

"It is probably what my father would have done if he went through graduate
school at the same time I did,'' Crick said._

How many revolutions in biology, math, and physics lost to computer
departments?

~~~
nlawalker
Reminds me of the Feynman "computer disease" quote:

 _“Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the
computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It 's
a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble
with computers is you _play _with them. They are so wonderful. You have these
switches - if it 's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do
that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are
clever enough, on one machine.

After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any
attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very
slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator
automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print
columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent
automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one
operation.

Absolutely useless. We _had _tables of arc-tangents. But if you 've ever
worked with computers, you understand the disease - the _delight _in being
able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time,
the poor fellow who invented the thing.”_

I haven't dug up and read that quote in a while - its persistent accuracy and
relevance pleases me :)

