Mavericks, misfits, revolutionaries, heretics, infidels; never a better time to be such a person.
\n\n", "content_hash": "sha256:f53aa37a78dfebbbb5a8c5e98f9399b647c2fce535d81c9e040f686bcb3819a9", "media": [], "changelog": [ { "version": 1, "at": "2026-10-04T11:39:00Z", "note": null } ] }Consider, for instance, the rise of molecular biology as a discipline. We think of Watson and Crick as molecular biologists, not as an ornithologist and a physicist. The first molecular biologists were a motley crew of misfits and revolutionaries with no particularly relevant training, many of them ex-physicists. These physicists didn't waste much time identifying themselves as physicists any more. They viewed themselves as a new kind of biologist. They burned their bridges. Max Delbrück dropped physics and started studying phage replication because it seemed like the fastest, best way to crack the molecular basis of heredity. It's hard to imagine molecular biology making such dramatic progress if it had involved forming interdisciplinary teams of physicists and biologists. The molecular biologists were viewed as naive infidels.