I think I set out to write a textbook which could be read for a long... you know, that wouldn't go out of date in three years, to try and put it in a broader reference frame. But, you know, everything was dominated John Kennedy in those, you know, several years. There's features, the glamour of his wife, the and suddenly style was back, and I think I wanted to be part of that era and, you know. I wanted to be, you know, a writer like Galbraith or someone, who was trying to do slightly more than the typical academic by putting it in a bigger picture, and sort of realizing, yeah, no-one had written the story and the... there was a big opportunity to... you couldn't just start with DNA, you had to put DNA in the context of everything.

And then I wanted to end on cancer because I wanted to end sort of where you might be going in the future, so when you finished the book, it made you want to be a biologist. That was certainly my aim, but, you know, I didn't go out and the one thing I was conscious before I started is I wanted to write a bestseller because I was conscious that Paul Samuelson had a big house in Belmont from his textbook, so the... I was aware that textbooks made money. And so I never had a big seller but even the The Molecular Biology of the Gene, which came out costing $6, it doubled my salary as a Harvard professor which was very important because I would never have been tempted to leave Harvard for money. But, you know, if I'd suddenly married and had that salary of a Harvard professor, that'd be depressing, you know, because I had... some of my friends had nice houses, and by the time I was writing I'd begun to collect paintings so the books were a device to continue to be an art collector.