Critique of The Prizewinners

Date:
1963
Reference:
PP/CRI/I/2/4
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Critique of <i>The Prizewinners</i>. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    CEITOF THE PRIZEWINNERS w by ANGUS WILSON The most interesting of recert programmes has been BBC's The Prizewinners, which introduced the Nobel Prizewinners (four Englishmen and an American who works with them) as private individuals. We had heard from Lord Mountbatten in an introductory- interview the night before that these men, some of whom had served as boffins under his command in the late war, would explode our conventional view of the kind of men scientists are. Well, I suppose that must depend on what you've always supposed top scientists to be like, and again whether you already number any among your acquaintance. I have known two successful scientists well and been acquainted with a good few more. Of course, at a certain level, they are simply a mixed bag of intellectuals, some tweedy and lute-loving, others sporting fancy waistcoats and wine snobbery? all a trifle donnish in one way or another, but then this they share with most intellectuals in a world where only a minute group of intelligentsia can make a living without academic subsidy. The differences of intellectual type were well illustrated in these prizewinners. Dr. Perutz, the pioneer (but they are all very young- middle-aged), with that slightly improbable English heartiness that never seems quite to leave the Hitler refugees who became British citizens, looks to mountains and skiing for solace. This is something that has long united many English with German or Austrian scholars in a kind of hearty high-mindedness that encompassed even such improbably Victorian humanists as Sir Leslie Stephen and John Addington Symonds. Dr. Francis Crick, on the other hand, was almost a caricature of the obsessively talking, idea- throwing-out don with a lot of disarming boyishness and bounce ; counterparts in the humanities abound, such various figures as the late Dr. Joad, A.J.Ayer or Isaiah Berlin coming immediately to mind. I could well understand what Dr. Crick's American collaborator Dr. James Watson (the only real wierdie of the five) seemed to imply about working with someone who talked so much as Dr. Crick. All the false hares and nutty suggestions, all the hours of exhausting listening and strained disagreement, are finally, miraculously, made infinitely worth while when a man like Dr. Crick eventually talks himself into one of the great revolutionary scientific theories of the century. And it's much more likely to happen in science than in the humanities. Dr. Wilkins, interviewed in his Hampstead garden_on rather a blowy day, was more the family-man don, with a ba.by daughter showing signs of scientific genius as she played with some instructional model Da.ddy had brought back from the States. Dr. Wilkins was the only one who