Eric Topol

Yeah.

Now, before that, uh, Nobel prize, which I think you summed up well, you know, who, how it was recognized, how it wasn't, uh, but there was a poem that, uh,

Francis Crick, I guess, stumbled into on a trip in San Francisco in 1959.

McClure, Peyote, can you tell us about that poem and how it influenced Crick?

I had to read it because I was so curious.

Written by a person who's, you know, on drugs.

Now, Crick was a drug user.

Did he do psychedelics with or other drugs with McClure?

Well, that's a perfect segue to the next pivot of Crick's life, the first one being from physics to molecular biology.

And as you said, even in 1947, he knew he was going to get to consciousness.

And so he's forced into retirement from MRC in Cambridge, and somehow he lands in La Jolla at the Salk Institute.

I guess also perhaps his friend Sidney Brenner played a role in that.

But he now is going to eventually, after he gets legs on this because it wasn't right straight away, at the Salk Institute, he's going to start a career in understanding consciousness, right?

Yeah.

And this culminates.

with his work of Christoph Koch in a book, The Astonishing Hypothesis.

It's actually astonishing, The Scientific Search for the Soul.

And this, to me, there's the text in that book where it says, you, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are in fact no more

than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

I mean, that's an astonishing hypothesis, right?