Francis Crick has pointed out an error in Walter Gratzer's review of Freeman Dyson's The Sun, the Genome and the Internet (Nature 398, 770–771; 1999). The quotation in the penultimate paragraph was by Oliver Edwards, an acquaintance of Samuel Johnson's, as recorded in James Boswell's The Life of Dr Johnson: “You are a philosopher, Dr Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher, but, I don't know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.”