The little anecdote about Peter Thiel about shitty physicists going into biology reminded me of a chapter from Richard Feynman's book, "Surely Your Joking Mr. F

The little anecdote about Peter Thiel about shitty physicists going into biology reminded me of a chapter from Richard Feynman's book, "Surely Your Joking Mr. Feynman". So it turns out Richard Feynman, after working in Los Alamos on the first nuclear bomb, and before going on to win a Nobel in Physics, actually did a stint as a biologist at CalTech. In fact he was doing some of the earliest work on ribosomes... so fundamental that he could have been the first person to discover that most all ribosomes were functionally equivalent: "It would have been a fantastic and vital discovery if I had been a good biologist. But I wasn't a good biologist. We had a good idea, a good experiment, the right equipment, but I screwed it up: I gave her infected ribosomes ­­ the grossest possible error that you could make in an experiment like that. My ribosomes had been in the refrigerator for almost a month, and had become contaminated with some other living things. Had I prepared those ribosomes promptly over again and given them to her in a serious and careful way, with everything under control, that experiment would have worked, and we would have been the first to demonstrate the uniformity of life: the machinery of making proteins, the ribosomes, is the same in every creature. We were there at the right place, we were doing the right things, but I was doing things as an amateur -- stupid and sloppy." So one of the world's best physicists almost became one of the world's most prominent molecular biologists, but actually fucked up the experiment for practical reasons. I think this really underscores how not every problem is fundamentally a math problem... In the real world, especially with biology there's a shit ton of practical tedious things to deal with that can hamstring even the most brilliant experiments.