David Miller
History & Archives Committee, The Physiological Society

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.98.39

John Nicholls’ book is an unalloyed delight. It fills a niche in that it gives lay readers a great insight into the human side of science; research is done by real people, each with their own agenda, fancies and foibles. John has done a great service here in revealing the depth and breadth of ‘characters’ that inhabit the research world to which he himself has made such notable contributions. For those of us also in science, many will read this fine book and kick themselves for not having catalogued their own acquaintances and anecdotes. But really, John’s cast of characters and stories will trump anything. He writes beautifully with a sense of wonder and pleasure at the strangeness that he has encountered in so many colleagues and collaborators, students and technicians. (Isn’t it interesting that the only normal people in this mad world are John, you and me?). John’s book displays his wonderful gift for writing.

Given how some folk come across, no shame or embarrassment is spared even for Nobel Prize winners, it’s a relief that the characters emerge quite so well as they do. Find out about gambling in Reno with Itzhak Parnas, receiving pivotal career advice from Silke Bernhard in Basel, eating with Paul Fatt at a London ‘greasy spoon’ café, electronic wizardry as well as practical car mechanics with Bob Bosler, technician in Steve Kuffler’s Baltimore lab, name-dropping with Hugo Arichiga in Mexico, or Pasko Rakic being car-jacked and then jailed in Boston. The sheer determination to overcome adversity, often politically imposed, displayed by the likes of Chang, Feng, Kostyuk, Vycklicky and other scientists is a lesson to all of us who enjoy the relatively ‘soft’ environment of an enlightened(?) western-world existence. I wonder how many of us would really stand up and ‘be Charlie’ if it came to it as several of John Nicholl’s heroes have had to do?

All this and we find out that even Bernard Katz farted!