If it hadn't been for the war...

The previous post about Freeman Dyson relates to something else I've been thinking about recently.

I am currently listening to "Biology: The Science of Life," a set of lectures from The Teaching Company. (Highly recommended. Biology is much more fascinating than I had realized.)

I'm only a few lectures into the course, but one name that keeps coming up over and over again is Francis Crick. Freeman Dyson tells a story about Francis Crick at the end of the online article that was the subject of the previous post:

HERETICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

Briefly, both Dyson and Crick were British physicists. They met for the first time in 1945, before World War II ended. Dyson was 21. Crick was 28, and had spent his 20s working for the British government in the war effort. Crick was depressed, because the war effort had taken six years out of his physics career. For a scientist, one's 20s are often a period of high productivity that sets the foundation for one's professional career.

At the time Freeman Dyson thought: "How sad. Such a bright chap. If it hadn’t been for the war, he would probably have been quite a good scientist."

But Francis Crick didn't give up. And he didn't return to physics, either. He changed disciplines to biology. Together with James Watson, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, he discovered the double-helix structure of DNA just eight years after the end of World War II. (Nobel prize 1962.) Francis Crick continued to make many important discoveries in biology until his death in 2004.