Harmony of the spheres

‘Mr Borodin, it would be better if you gave less thought to writing songs. I have placed all my hopes in you and want you to be my successor one day. You waste too much time thinking about music. A man cannot serve two masters.’

Many of us, at some point, have been admonished for spending too little time on our scientific work – and so this reproach from Nikolai Zinin, the ‘father’ of Russian organic chemistry, to his protégé, Alexander Borodin, may, a century-and-a-half later, still elicit our empathy!