Destroying an Idea Is a Path to Progress
Geneticist Paul Nurse on his Nobel Prize-winning discovery, the importance of failure, and a revelation about his own origins. The post Destroying an Idea Is a Path to Progress appeared first on Nautilus.
Paul Nurse is a geneticist whose own heredity was entirely hidden from him until fairly recently, when he was forced to take a closer look at his birth certificate. There he uncovered a long-held family secret about his identity.
He finds this irony more amusing than disturbing, however. Nurse is a student of failure—he failed repeatedly to pass university entrance exams and botched an important student project that almost set him off his path. But instead, he perfected his experimental methods and went on to make enormous contributions to the field of genetics, winning the 2001 Nobel Prize in Medicine, together with Leland Hartwell and Tim Hunt, for his discoveries
