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Two items signed by legendary geneticist James Watson, both sent to Nobel Prize-winning South African biologist Sydney Brenner, and related to the release of his 2007 autobiography Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science, which was originally titled Manners for Science. The first item is a TLS signed “Jim,” one page, 5.5 x 8.5, personal Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory letterhead, no date, in full: “Here is my almost final version of Manners for Science — my life as a youth, scientist, and academic through June 1976, when my professorship at Harvard ended. The epilogue recounts my visit back to Harvard thirty years later when I saw Derek Bok at the urging of Tom Maniatis. Oxford University Press wants to publish Manners in May 2007 with my American Publisher, Knopf, hopefully sending out their version not too much later. Many of you to whom I'm sending this manuscript participated in one or more of the events I here describe. If you spot events that you remember differently, please let me know. I want the printed version to be as error-free as possible.” The second item is the referenced spiral-bound “final version of Manners for Science,” 490 pages, 9 x 11, signed on the title page in black ballpoint, “Jim Watson.” In overall fine condition. Accompanied by a typed early review of Avoid Boring People that Brenner wrote on October 25, 2007, which bears a few handwritten corrections.
Biologist Sydney Brenner (1927–2019) shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with H. Robert Horvitz and Sir John E. Sulston in 2002. Brenner made significant contributions to work on the genetic code and other areas of molecular biology while working in the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. Together with Jack Dunitz, Dorothy Hodgkin, Leslie Orgel, and Beryl M. Oughton, he was one of the first people in April 1953 to see the model of the structure of DNA, constructed by Francis Crick and James Watson; at the time, he and the other scientists were working at the University of Oxford's Chemistry Department. All were impressed by the new DNA model, especially Brenner, who subsequently worked with Crick in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and the newly opened MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.
