The Physics of DNA: The Justin Timberlake of Physics

       Gamow is another good example of the Hubris of Physics (tm), characterized by outgoing, supremely confident, playful yet arrogant  nature of the field-jumping physicist.  Gamow was apparently known to be a funny guy -- well, funny in a physics way, the kind of way that makes comb-overs flop in mirth.  He once got another preeminent physicist, Hans Bethe, to be a coauthor on a paper with him and Ralph Alpher, forming the coauthor triplet Alpher, Bethe, Gamow.  (Get it????)  (Sounds kind of like the first three letters of the greek alphabet?)  (Ehhh, you had to be there...)  If there is a more concentrated, over-the-top example of this caricature of a physicist than Crick or Gamow, it's another famous physicist named Richard Feynman, a theorist who is an absolute legend in the world of physics, probably the very best American-born physicist ever.  And lo and behold, Feynman also moonlighted in biology as a hobby, and again casually outperformed (and probably pissed off) many expert biologists of the time.

       I'm not ashamed to admit that I have a man-crush on Richard Feynman, and I'm not alone -- he's become a folk hero in physics, a larger-than-life figure with an outsized personality probably never seen in theoretical physicists.  Grad students in quantum theory probably have a pin-up poster of him on their walls. 

      Max Delbruck convinced Feynman (also at Caltech) to spend one of his sabbatical years in Delbruck's lab doing microbiology work washing dishes and torturing bacteria, a future Nobel prize winner working side by side with grad students.  Feynman liked to affect an "aw shucks" bumbling innocence in fields outside his own, yet he managed to do well enough in Delbruck's lab to impress James Watson (the other DNA guy), and very nearly made a major contribution to the field.  He was apparently the first person to ever see something called "intragenic suppression" (not nearly as painful as it sounds), but was too lazy or sloppy to wrap up his work for publication.  I'm sure his refusal to take his work seriously must have *infuriated* the other poor folks in the lab who were actually trying to launch a new field of biology, but it's typical for a scientific giant like Feynman.

        And now we have the relentless free-for-all