I realised I would never be good at research. You need to be really... first of all, you need to be very dextrous about how things work and I'm not particularly and the other thing is you... they thought I was good because I was careful and, but that's a different thing really and, you have to also be able to cone down on a very focused, accessible problem. Didn't Medawar call it this, the art of the possible?

[Q] The art of the possible, yes, yes, yes.

Wasn't it, is that right? The art of the possible. Absolutely bang on. Now, I think there are two kinds of research folk. There's a very rare chap, Watson, Crick, who... Brenner, who don't do that, they go for the jugular and they're able to do it. I think the rest of us go for little things and that's the way you do it and... and I knew I wasn't terribly good at that. I could think of big questions which were totally useless to think about, except for the Watsons and the Cricks, and so I... I wanted it to be part of my life because of this business of coning down. I wanted really to try and get to know about some things. I mean, you know, if you're doing medicine you've got to... the patients asking you a question, you've got to... either got somebody else or see what you can do. I mean, if you were doing history, you wouldn't do it that way. You'd say: China between 43BC and 69AD, oh Europe, oh well, I don't know that. You know, you can do... you can't do that in medicine, can you? You've got a... you've got a problem before you and I couldn't... I couldn't really do with that as my whole life. I needed to have something I focused on.