Monday, October 08, 2018

what was true ... was not original, and most of what was original was known not to be true

--- Max Perutz on Erwin Schrodinger's What's Life, via Phil Ball in the Nature podcast of 5 Sep 2018, interview about his article in Nature Books and Arts, Schrödinger’s cat among biology’s pigeons: 75 years of What Is Life?

Ball's article cites a 1987 paper by Perutz, Physics and the riddle of life, where he grumbled that "what was true in his book was not original, and most of what was original was known not to be true even when the book was written”.