Out of Africa

I spent most of December and more than half of January engaged in a series of respiratory infections that seemed to be resistant to all the antibiotics that I could find. I began to have visions of being the first to succumb to a new plague which would finally eliminate humanity. Years ago, flying in the old propeller-driven aeroplanes, I used to imagine that I could penetrate directly into the intricate machinery and could see the hairline cracks developing on the spinning crankshafts, but I resisted bringing this to the attention of the crew. With the same tele-microscopic eye, I now saw an 18 kilobase plasmid in the bacteria in my bronchi, carrying resistance genes for everymycin, omnicillin and totocycline, with multiple sex factors capable of transferring this lethal ring of DNA to all bacteria and possibly to fungal and other cells too. Actually what I had was 'flu from Europe succeeded by another from Japan and then a third from America. I also suffered a little from what I call justifiable hypochondria, which is that you are better off with the diseases you think you have than the ones you might really get. In the last week or so in January I returned to South Africa for the first time since a very short visit in 1972, which had been the first since I left in 1956 to go to Cambridge. In Johannesburg everything had changed completely. The old Medical School building was still there but was used for something else. From the outside of the building I identified the windows of the BSc Lab where I began my formal training in science at the beginning of 1944. I also found the windows of the office I shared with Seymour Papert in 1951. It was Seymour who taught me what little mathematics I know; in return, I taught him neurophysiology. He certainly was the better pupil and also probably the better teacher. Seymour was at that time interested in Group Theory and in something called Lattice Algebra. Although I did go systematically through the elementary algebra of groups, I found that I could not understand it by starting with axioms and going on to prove theorems. The symbols just would not enter my head: and I could only get to grips with it by drawing pictures. I discovered that a matchbox was the best way to understand the non-commutativity …