Peter Doherty - The Beginners Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize: A Life in Science

This book is intended for a general readership that may not necessarily know much about, or even have sympathy for, the world of science. It would not have existed if Mary Cunnane had not offered her services as a literary agent and, as the true professional she is, made the telling point that although speaking and writing for ephemeral formats is fine, nothing enduring or comprehensive can come of that approach. Even with Marys patient support, it took Louise Adler of Melbourne University Publishing to finally induce me to make a commitment and embark on the process. Louise also suggested the title, and has provided resolutely good-humoured support and advice throughout.

Though I have written hundreds of thousands of words that have been published in various science formats over the past forty years and have also, since the Nobel Award in 1996, composed articles and commentaries for newspapers and magazines, I quickly discovered that I was a total novice when it came to the business of creating an interesting and readable book.

Two experienced professionals, editorial consultant Kristine Olsson and Melbourne University Publishings Sybil Nolan, took the 70,000 words or so of my original draft, re-ordered them, consigned whole chunks to the waste basket, then drew me out on various themes and forced me to extract more personal memories and stories from my own memory banks and the files that my wife Penny has organised and kept since 1996. Many of the more personal reminiscences are as much Pennys as mine: we shared the same experience, but remembered different bits. She has also edited and commented on everything that is written here. Michael Doherty critiqued the paragraphs on Parkinsons disease and schizophrenia. Though most of the ideas, the discussion and 99 per cent of the words in this book are mine, I had a great deal of very high quality direction and encouragement.

Most of the material reflects my own perceptions that have been formed both by my years in the scientific community and by my passion for reading broadly, particularly biography and history. Many of the vague recollections and half memories were checked on a variety of websites accessed via Google, and from books on our own shelves like David Marrs excellent biography of Patrick White. My thinking about the future of science was greatly influenced by years of reading News and Views summaries in both Nature and Science , which is about all any scientist can hope to keep up with outside his or her own specialist field. Talking with colleagues has also been a big help. In particular, the stories about the new Asian Pasteur Institutes came from a chance dinner conversation with the Director, the eminent immunologist Philippe Kourilsky Sherwood Rowland helped clarify some of the confusion in the complex area of global warming. John Burns and Tony Klein provided useful insights into the lifestyles of mathematicians and physicists.

A great deal of the information about the Nobel Prizes and the other laureates is taken directly from the Nobel website (http://nobelprize.org/). This carries the citations, the presentation speeches, the brief biographies and the Nobel lectures of every Laureate since 1901, together with a lot of other supportive material. The website is a function of the Nobel e-museum, the brainchild of Nils Ringertz, the secretary of the Nobel medicine committee who called us on that early October morning in 1996. He immediately became a good friend, and we were delighted to see him again at the 100th anniversary celebrations in December 2001. With a sense of great loss, we learned that he died suddenly in 2002, in his seventieth year.