Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, developed an interest in biology while he was a graduate student at Princeton. He started attending a course in cell physiology, which required him to report on papers assigned to him. One such paper was about measuring the voltages generated by the nerves in cats: I began to read the paper. It kept talking about extensors and flexors, the gastrocnemius muscle, and so on. This and that muscle were named, but I hadn’t the foggiest idea of w...
