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, Pennsylvania. He appears in
Dont Look Back,
D. A. Pennebaker's documentary film about
Bob Dylan, in which he is subjected to what he believed to be a contrived tirade of abuse from Dylan. During Judson's interview, Dylan launches into a verbal attack on
Time magazine, and Judson himself. The film's producer Pennebaker does not believe the tirade was planned, but notes that Dylan backed off, not wanting to come across as being too cruel. However, Judson believed the confrontation was contrived to make the sequence more entertaining. "That evening", said Judson, "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==