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 muta-
tion 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 pronouncing the words, knowing
what not to include in a paper or seminar, and detecting a
weak technique in an experiment.  But I love physics, and I 
love to go back to it.