Francis Crick

Francis Harry Compton Crick was born on June 8, 1916, in Northampton, England, where his father and uncle ran a shoe and boot factory founded by his grandfather ^[1]. The family business gave the Cricks a comfortable middle-class life, though the trade declined during Francis's childhood. His grandfather, Walter Drawbridge Crick, was an amateur naturalist who had corresponded with Charles Darwin, a family story the younger Crick enjoyed telling ^[2].

As a boy Crick devoured a children's encyclopedia his parents bought him, and he later recalled worrying that all the interesting scientific questions would be answered before he grew up ^[2]. He attended Northampton Grammar School and then Mill Hill School in north London on a scholarship, where he showed a strong aptitude for mathematics, physics, and chemistry ^[1].

Crick studied physics at University College London, taking a second-class honours degree in 1937. He began doctoral research there on the viscosity of water at high temperatures, a problem he later described as the dullest imaginable. The Second World War interrupted the project when a German bomb destroyed his laboratory apparatus, an accident he came to regard as a stroke of luck ^[2].

During the war Crick worked for the British Admiralty, designing magnetic and acoustic mines used against German shipping. The work sharpened his practical grasp of physics and introduced him to scientific problem solving under pressure ^[1]. When peace came he was nearly thirty, without a doctorate, and unsure of his direction.

Crick applied what he called the gossip test: whatever you find yourself gossiping about is what you truly care about. His own conversation kept returning to two subjects, the borderline between the living and the nonliving, and the workings of the brain ^[2]. He chose the first, convinced that the tools of physics and chemistry could crack the deepest problems of biology. Erwin Schrödinger's short 1944 book What Is Life?, which argued that genes must store a code-script in their molecular structure, reinforced that conviction for Crick as it did for several physicists of his generation ^[3].

After a spell at the Strangeways Laboratory in Cambridge studying the physical properties of cytoplasm, Crick joined the Medical Research Council unit at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1949. There, under Max Perutz and Lawrence Bragg, he learned X-ray crystallography and applied it to the structure of proteins, finally earning his PhD from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1954 ^[1].

In 1951 a talkative American postdoctoral researcher named James Watson arrived at the Cavendish, and the two men quickly discovered a shared obsession: the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, the molecule increasingly suspected of carrying hereditary information ^[4]. Watson was twelve years younger, but the partnership worked because each man said exactly what he thought and neither hesitated to demolish the other's bad ideas.

Their method was model building guided by other people's data. Crucial evidence came from King's College London, where Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins were producing X-ray diffraction photographs of DNA fibres. Franklin's measurements, including the famous Photograph 51 shown to Watson by Wilkins early in 1953, indicated a helical structure with a repeating backbone on the outside ^[4]. Crick's mathematical understanding of helical diffraction, worked out earlier with William Cochran and Vladimir Vand, let the pair interpret such data with unusual confidence ^[5].

The breakthrough came in late February 1953, when Watson, shuffling cardboard cutouts of the four bases, saw that an adenine-thymine pair had the same shape as a guanine-cytosine pair. Crick immediately grasped that this complementary pairing explained how the molecule could be copied: each strand serves as a template for rebuilding its partner. Their paper in Nature on April 25, 1953, barely a page long, ended with one of the most quoted sentences in science, noting that the specific pairing they proposed immediately suggested a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material ^[6]. In 1962 Crick, Watson, and Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery; Franklin, who died of cancer in 1958, was not eligible, as the prize is not awarded posthumously ^[7].

Among Francis Crick achievements, the double helix is only the most famous. Through the late 1950s and 1960s he did as much as anyone to establish how the information in DNA actually becomes a living organism. In a 1957 lecture he set out two organizing ideas: the sequence hypothesis, which held that the order of bases in a nucleic acid specifies the order of amino acids in a protein, and what he called the central dogma, the principle that sequence information flows from nucleic acid to protein and not back again ^[8].

Crick also predicted, on purely theoretical grounds, that small adaptor molecules must exist to carry each amino acid to the template during protein synthesis. The later discovery of transfer RNA vindicated the idea ^[8]. In 1961 he and Sydney Brenner, with colleagues at Cambridge, published an elegant genetic experiment using mutations in a bacterial virus which showed that the genetic code is read in groups of three bases, in a fixed reading frame, from a fixed starting point ^[6].

By 1966 the full code linking all sixty-four possible base triplets to the twenty amino acids had been worked out by laboratories around the world, with Crick acting as a kind of theorist-in-chief who framed the questions, criticized the proposals, and kept a running tally of the answers ^[1]. He remained at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, which he had helped shape into the most productive centre of the new science, until the mid 1970s.

Crick married Ruth Doreen Dodd in 1940; their son Michael was born in 1940, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1947 ^[1]. In 1949 he married Odile Speed, a French-born artist he had met during the war. Odile drew the simple double helix diagram that appeared in the 1953 Nature paper, probably the most reproduced scientific sketch of the century ^[4]. The couple had two daughters, Gabrielle and Jacqueline, and remained together until his death.

Their Cambridge house, named the Golden Helix, became known for lively parties, and Crick himself for a booming laugh that Lawrence Bragg reportedly found hard to endure. Colleagues described him as relentlessly talkative, quick to seize the weak point of an argument, and generous with ideas he never bothered to publish under his own name ^[2].

Crick was an outspoken atheist and declined a knighthood, though he accepted the Order of Merit from Queen Elizabeth II in 1991, an honour limited to twenty-four living members ^[1]. He resigned a fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge, in 1961 over a decision to build a college chapel, arguing that a new foundation for science should not endow religion ^[2].

In 1976 Crick left Cambridge for the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, where he had held a nonresident fellowship since the institute's early days. Turning sixty, he switched fields for the second time in his life, taking up the other subject that had passed his gossip test decades before: the brain ^[9].

Crick focused on what he considered the hardest and most neglected problem in neuroscience, the biological basis of consciousness. He argued that consciousness was a legitimate subject for experimental science rather than philosophy alone, and proposed studying visual awareness as a tractable entry point. From the late 1980s he worked closely with the young neuroscientist Christof Koch of Caltech, publishing a series of papers seeking the neural correlates of consciousness ^[9].

His 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis put the program before the public, arguing that a person's joys, sorrows, memories, and sense of identity are the behaviour of nerve cells and their associated molecules ^[10]. Crick kept working through his final illness, revising a paper on the claustrum, a thin sheet of neurons he suspected of coordinating conscious experience, in his last weeks. He died of colon cancer in La Jolla on July 28, 2004, at the age of 88 ^[7].

Any Francis Crick biography has to reckon with the scale of what followed the 1953 discovery. The double helix opened the way to molecular genetics, recombinant DNA technology, DNA fingerprinting, genome sequencing, and modern biotechnology. Straightforward Francis Crick facts convey some of the recognition: the Nobel Prize in 1962, fellowship of the Royal Society from 1959, the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1975, and the Order of Merit in 1991 ^[1].

His name is carried by the Francis Crick Institute in London, opened in 2016 as the largest biomedical research institute under one roof in Europe, a joint venture of the Medical Research Council, Cancer Research UK, the Wellcome Trust, and three London universities ^[11]. The Salk Institute, University College London, and Cambridge all maintain lectureships, professorships, or archives in his memory.

Historians continue to debate the treatment of Rosalind Franklin, whose data were used without her direct knowledge, and Crick himself acknowledged in later life that she had come closer to the structure than he and Watson realized at the time ^[4]. What remains beyond argument is his intellectual range. Few scientists have shaped one revolution; Crick helped drive two, first in molecular biology and then in the scientific study of consciousness, and in both he insisted that the deepest mysteries of life would yield to patient, mechanistic explanation ^[9].