Let me begin with a motor trip in 1944 by two scientists down the valley from Lord Mountbatten's headquarters in Kandy to the jungle. The younger of the two remembers what his companion talked about. He was

interested and expert in everything around him - the war, Buddhist religion and art, the geological specimens he would retrieve from every ditch, the properties of mud, luminous insects, the ancestry of cycads, but his recurrent theme was the fundamentals of biology and of the enormous developments just becoming possible through the advances in the physical and chemical techniques of the 1930s.

LRB 9 March 2006 | PDF Download