Bloomington Genetics in 1950
I liked reading bits of Professor David Nanney’s
“Candide in Academe Meets Tracy Agonistes
A Memoir of the Morning of Molecular Biology :
Coming of Age in Bloomington - 1946-1951″. He’s the husband of my grade-school music teacher in Urbana, and it’s interesting to compare his stories of Bloomington Genetics in 1950 with Sylvia Nasar’s stories of Princeton Mathematics at the same time. I wish we had as thrilling an atmosphere in my department now, but of course those two departments were at the top of their fields at the times they are described.