Kay Jamison on Jim Watson writer "The Double Helix"
  Kay Jamison     Biography    
Recorded: 09 Sep 2003

I know Jim as an extraordinary writer. And I always feel impressed by, I think, The Double Helix will be one of the classics, already it’s one of the classics. And for us, for a whole generation that first read The Double Helix it was elegantly, beautifully written, fast-paced adventure story. It was sort part Robert Louis Stevenson and part James Barry. It was a tale of setbacks, adventure and excitement and glory and just wonderfulness. And it opened up a whole new world, I think, for everyone who read it in my generation. There was a sense that science was fun, it was an adventure, it was competitive, it was fast, and most of all that we should take your intellectual life very, very, very seriously.

Kay Jamison is a clinical psychologist and writer, professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She earned B.A. and M.A. degrees form University of California in 1971 and Ph.D. in 1975 and she became faculty member.

She is famous expert on biopolar disorder and co-author of textbook on bipolar disorder. She suffers herself from manic-depressive illness. There were cases of that illness in her family on her father's side. She was under treatment but she attempted suicide by taking an overdose of lithium.

She is an author of such books as Touched with Fire, An Unquiet Mind, and Night Falls Fast. An Unquiet Mind is memoir about her experiences with manic-depression and was selected by The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, and the Seattle Post Intelligencer as one of the best books of 1995. During her career she received numerous awards. At the time when she was professor at Hopkins she was also lecturer at a number of different institutions. In 2002 she was distinguished lecturer at Harvard University and in 2003 Litchfield lecturer at the University of Oxford.

More Information: Wikipedia