That grew out of teaching ten lectures in Biology Two, and, when I gave lectures, I essentially outlined them and had some instead of a word like PH I would, you know, have a sentence. And then, I had long come to the conclusion that you cannot think and write at the same time, and so you can't understand a lecture if you're taking down notes. And so students shouldn't take notes, and so I passed out lecture notes. The students still took notes even though I passed out the lecture notes, but the lecture notes would be, you know, what you should know to pass the exam.

There was at that stage no textbook on DNA and so the molecular biology, or some of the middle chapters, came out of the lecture notes, and then I thought, you should write a couple of chapters of introduction so a physicist or chemist might be able to read the book. So you should give a 15-page summary of the great moments in Mendelian genetics or give, you know, 15-20 pages which summarize the basic facts of metabolism of how cells get and use energy. And then I realized you probably should have a chapter on how molecules fold up in three dimensions. So I ended up I think with five introductory chapters which were not in my lecture notes but were trying to broaden the readership, so if you were a physicist and wanted to read it you get the basic principles and you didn't need to know any more detail. So that proved to be... and then that was that.

So I started it... you know, the book started out with DNA, I mean my courses started out with, but then I realized, no, that's not the way to start the book. The book should start with Darwin and put DNA in perspective to what Darwin and Mendelian where we were, say, in 1945, and it wasn't, I was writing The Molecular Biology of the Gene and The Double Helix at the same time, so I remember writing the first pages of The Molecular Biology of the Gene in October. It was an awful October. All right, it was October 1963 when Kennedy was killed so that's when I started it and no, I wrote the first chapter at the end of August. I was going out to Australia and they wanted some material and I thought, oh, I can it would be a way to go into a book. And so I tried to write a one page you know, first paragraph on Darwin and then go on, and I wanted to write... I wanted to write literature so I wanted it to not sound like the average biology text but write it as if it's the Bible or something like that.