Master of the Game (1998) | Hacker News Reader

Master of the Game (1998)

crick.com

19 pointsmr_tyzic5 comments

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?

After that job at the IBM Scientific Center, [Richard] Stallman had held a laboratory-assistant position in the biology department at Rockefeller University. Although he was already moving toward a career in math or physics, Stallman's analytical mind impressed the lab director enough that a few years after Stallman departed for college, Lippman received an unexpected phone call. "It was the professor at Rockefeller," Lippman says. "He wanted to know how Richard was doing. He was surprised to learn that he was working in computers. He'd always thought Richard had a great future ahead of him as a biologist."

https://web.archive.org/web/20120716190637/http://www.faifzi...

How many gained in automation?

Big shoes to fill and it seems like history shows us those shoes rarely get filled. But he seems like a very happy guy and that's important too.

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 :)

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