THE geneticist Steve Jones once observed that “science is a broad church full of narrow minds, trained to know ever more about even less”. Certainly, many scientists I know seem clueless about developments in fields other than their own. Ask a physicist about prions, and you might end up getting a lecture about subatomic particles rather than proteins, while some biologists seem to think that dark matter is a form of compost.
Given the years of study needed to get on top of any area of science, this is perhaps unsurprising. Yet there are those with minds so agile that…
