Nobel prize winner Harold Varmus talks about his memoir, The Art and Politics of Science, also reviewed at NYT. Occasionally on Saturday mornings, I traveled across the Charles River to join some Amherst classmates at Harvard Medical School, while they sat in the Ether Dome at the Massachusetts General Hospital, entranced by diagnostic dilemmas discussed at the weekly clinical pathology conference. These stories struck me as far more interesting than those I was reading, and my medical school friends expressed genuine excitement about their work. They also seemed to have formed a community of scholars, with shared interests in the human body and its diseases and common expectations that they would soon be able to do something about those diseases. These Saturday excursions probably account for an influential dream that I had one night about my continuing indecision. In that dream, my future literature students were relieved when I didn’t turn up to teach a class, but my future patients were disappointed when I didn’t appear. It seemed I wanted to be wanted ...
From the NYT review: The pleasure of science, he believes, lies in the “balance between the imagination of the individual and the conviction of the community.” If only civic affairs were so harmonious.
From Literature to the Lab | 
