Horace Freeland Judson

Horace Freeland Judson (April 21, 1931 – May 6, 2011) was a journalist and later more prominently a historian of molecular biology. He authored several books, including The Eighth Day of Creation, a history of molecular biology, and The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science, an examination of the deliberate manipulation of scientific data.

Life and career Horace Freeland Judson was born on 21 April 1931, in Manhattan, New York. He contracted polio at the age of 13, and the disease left him with a withered right arm. and worked for seven years for Time magazine as a European correspondent in London and Paris. He subsequently wrote for The New Yorker, Harper's, and Nature among others. Judson spent nine years on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University and then four years as a research scholar at Stanford University. He was the director of the now defunct Center for History of Recent Science and a Research Professor of History at George Washington University. In 1987 Judson was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

The Eighth Day of Creation arose out of Judson's acquaintance with Max Perutz. In 1968 came the idea of a book about the discovery of the structures of cellular macromolecules. Following a discussion with Jacques Monod in 1969, Judson expanded his planned book to a general history of molecular biology. The result is based on interviews of over 100 scientists, cross-checked and re-interviewed over a period of seven years. The book was partially serialized in three issues of The New Yorker in November and December 1978. Following the publication of the book, Judson deposited the tapes and transcripts of the interviews at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.

Judson appears in a key scene in Dont Look Back, D. A. Pennebaker's documentary film about Bob Dylan, in which Dylan taunts him and expresses disdain for Time during an interview for the magazine before a concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Pennebaker does not believe the tirade was planned, but notes that Dylan eventually backed off, not wanting to come across as being too cruel. However, Judson believed the confrontation was contrived to make the sequence more entertaining. He reflected: "That evening, I went to the concert. My opinion then and now was that the music was unpleasant, the lyrics inflated, and Dylan, a self-indulgent whining show off".

Personal life Judson's first marriage ended in divorce. His second wife, Penelope Jones, died in 1993. is a leadership consultant and trainer. After her successful 25-year corporate career, she won the title of Fastest Knitter in America in 2002, appearing on Good Morning America in October of that year. His younger daughter, Olivia Judson, is a science journalist and currently a research fellow in evolutionary biology at Imperial College London; she is also the author of the popular science book Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation. His younger son, Nicholas Judson, was a scientist at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, but left science to pursue a new career as a self-employed artist.

Judson was an atheist.

Publications

Articles

Books Heroin Addiction: What Americans Can Learn from the English Experience (1975). Vintage Books, ISBN 0-394-72017-2 The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology (1979). Touchstone Books, ISBN 0-671-22540-5. 2nd edition: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1996 paperback: ISBN 0-87969-478-5. The Search for Solutions (1982). Holt Rinehart & Winston, ISBN 0-03-043771-7 Science in Crisis at the Millennium (1999). New York Academy of Sciences, ISBN 1-57331-106-5 The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science (2004). Harcourt, ISBN 0-15-100877-9