Avoid boring people

James D. Watson looks back on his extraordinary and varied career -- from its beginnings as a schoolboy in Chicago´s South Side to the day he left Harvard almost 50 years later, world-renowned as the co-discoverer of DNA -- and considers the lessons he has learnt along the way. The result is both an engagingly eccentric memoir and an insightful compendium of lessons in life for aspiring scientists. Watson´s ´manners´ range from those he learnt bird-watching with his father during the Great Depression (´Avoid fighting bigger boys and dogs´ and ´Find a young hero to emulate´) to the manners appropriate for a Nobel Prize (´Have friends close to those who rule´). He evokes his time as a graduate student in the 1940s (´Hire spunky lab helpers´); the excitement of working in DNA for the first time as well as having his first dates; his time working as a White House advisor; and at Harvard in the ´70s.