Autobiographical Sketch
In Man, Mind, And Heredity, Johns Hopkins Press, London 1971, pp. 1-23.
The Road to Psychiatry
It must have been about 1919, when I was fifteen, that my father came to see me at my boarding school while on leave from India. At that time he was Professor of Indian Economics in the University of Madras, a post that kept him out of England over a critical period of my career. As I remember it, we went for a walk about the school grounds, and he asked me what I wanted to do with myself in life. I told him I wanted to he a doctor, and I think he must have sighed. My parents were never well off, and it must have been a grievous task to put three sons through fee‑charging "public" schools and a university afterwards. To be asked to undertake the additional cost of supporting a son during the years he was a medical student must have been hard. Yet he did not attempt to persuade me out of it.
Retrospect
In Man, Mind, And Heredity, Johns Hopkins Press, London 1971, pp. 367-280
Perhaps it was in part the working of an instinctive internal direction‑finder, and not merely good fortune, which led me in the end to combine genetics with psychiatry. I believed what my teachers told me, that work along genetical lines might help one to understand these illnesses, abnormal states that showed themselves in such subtle ways that most medical men preferred to have nothing to do with them ‑ and so left them to the trick cyclist. What a challenge, then, to be sent out into a largely uncharted, a mysterious, dark and rather uncanny world, and to go provided with the lamp which the basic life sciences had lit!
Short Communication
On Accepting the Second Annual Theodosius Dobzhansky Memorial Award for Research in Behavior Genetics
Behavior Genetics, Vol. 8, No. 6. 1978
It is a signal and most unexpected honor to have been selected for the Second Annual Theodosius Dobzhansky Memorial Award, so high in a list which will extend down the decades into a future of ever‑growing distinction. Dobzhansky himself will surely remain one of the giants among these men and women to come; and I feel very humble at being set, thus, in his spiritual presence. He was not only a great scientist but, which is more for me, a man of wisdom, a broadly humane and generous spirit. It was always the great issues that face mankind which were his first concern, inspiring him in his empirical and his theoretical studies.