Guess

Another sweet piece of memory I have from our university library is the game of guessing examination question over the pre-clinical years.

It goes like this: Shortly after I got admitted to the medical school and began the first year of preparatory study, I found that many professors did not teach according to the textbook.

But it didn’t take long for me to find out why. A few weeks later, out of the boredom of my study in the library, I flipped through some returned books that were not yet shelved, and, you know what, I found one that contained all the pictures and notes that appeared in the lecture. Obviously the professor used that book as the skeleton of his teaching, and, after he had copied all he needed, he returned the book to the library.

From that time onward, I went through the shelf of “returned books” in the library almost every other day to double-check if there was information that I was not too clear from the classroom teaching, as well as to gather clues for examination question – not infrequently with a gratifying result.

Alas, I must say the reward of this exercise was sometimes more than a pragmatic one. For the microbiology course that I took during the preparatory year, I found that the professor was not using any textbook of that subject for his teaching – the material was found in a nondescript hard cover volume that I discovered at another corner of the library.

I read it through, and was thoroughly illuminated.

It took me some time to realize the book was James Watson’s all time classic: Molecular Biology of the Gene.