English: I had the great honor to have lunch with James Watson. I will try to collect some of the especially spunky gems to share on a later post.

Here you see as the proud new owner of a LEGO Double Helix kit.

It was a symbolic gift, since Watson’s breakthrough technique in 1953 involved fiddling with 3D metal models.

“We needed a shortcut, so we build a model instead of solving a formula. Our three strand model was crap, so I was told to build no models… So, it all happened in about two hours. We went from nothing to thing.” (from an earlier talk)