Richard Dawkins, writing for The Edge, says
In a 1968 book review of THE DOUBLE HELIX, anthologised in PLUTO’S REPUBLIC, the distinguished biologist Sir Peter Medawar wrote that if a
young man as talented as Jim Watson had been born British, especially in
the Cambridge of his and Crick’s time, he would have been steered towards
literary studies:“It just so happens that during the 1950s, the first great age of molecular biology, the English Schools of Oxford and particularly of Cambridge produced more than a score of graduates of quite outstanding ability ?much more brilliant, inventive, articulate and dialectically skilful than most young scientists; right up in the Watson class. But Watson had one towering advantage over all of them: in addition to being extremely clever he had something important to be clever ABOUT.”