The Operon: On Its Third Anniversary

Abstract

22 October issue presents the wildly improbable coincidence of containing both a letter about parapsychology and spontaneous cases (p. 436) and a spontaneous case. For on page 463, as part of my comments on the 1965 Nobel Laureates in Medicine or Physiology, there appears the phrase The operator ‘loses’. . ., though what I had actually written was The operator ‘closes’.... Now since I happen to have some doubts about the validity of the operator concept, doubts that I certainly would not consciously have wished to introduce on this happy occasion [though I did voice them earlier in Science 144, 816 (1964)], this strange error can be explained only as a Freudian slip by a member of the editorial staff of Science acting under the telekinetic influence of an author9s psyche.