Francis CrickFrancis H.C. Crick, co-discoverer of one of the most important scientific findings of the 20th century, the recognition of the "double-helix" structure of DNA as the blueprint to life, died last week in San Diego aged 88.
Crick's powerful intellect and willingness to cross the boundaries of scientific disciplines led him and colleague James D. Watson to understand the "twisted ladder" structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, which carries information about heredity. What they learned was that each strand of the double helix could become a template for copying an organism's genes, and that replication is the way that every living cell has been created.
After that discovery in 1953, scientific understanding leapfrogged previously insurmountable barriers, ultimately giving birth to the €40 billion-a-year biotechnology industry. Scientists placed human genes in bacteria to create new drugs, manipulated plant genes to resist disease, used DNA to identify criminals, helped couples to have babies...
Crick's work with Watson on the double-helix structure, and his subsequent work firming up the foundations of molecular biology, made him a seminal scientific figure. "He is a giant," said Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, at the National Institutes of Health. "It's fair to say Francis Crick defined the discipline of theoretical biology, " Richard A. Murphy, president of the Salk Institute, Crick's research base for the past 28 years, said. "Francis Crick will be remembered as one of the most brilliant and influential scientists of all time."
The British-born Crick was 33 when, in 1949, he began studying at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University for a PhD and where he would meet, Watson, a young American scientist in his 20s.
The news of the double-helix discovery was published on May 23rd, 1953, in the British journal Nature, but it was several weeks before the world noticed. Perhaps it was because Crick and Watson almost concealed their conclusions with one of the great understatements of science and literature: "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."
It was not in character. Watson wrote in his 1968 book The Double Helix that he had "never seen Crick in a modest mood". Crick, he said, walked into the dingy pub where they habitually lunched and loudly announced they had found the secret to life. Crick's wife, Odile Speed, said he told her the same but she disregarded it because he was always coming home saying things like that.
In 1962, Crick, Watson and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in medicine for their work at the Cavendish. Rosalind Franklin, who also worked on the research, died in 1958 before the Nobel was awarded. It is not awarded posthumously.
Unlike many biologists, Crick and Watson did not conduct experiments. Their technique was thinking, arguing and thinking some more. Watson's sister typed the manuscript for Nature, and the scientists didn't even build the final model of the double helix, leaving that to Crick's wife, an artist who principally painted nudes.
Crick spent the next 13 years building on the discovery. Crick and Watson suggested a theory for the structure of small viruses. Crick and Sydney Brenner accurately proposed the existence of small chemicals known as "adapters" that are needed to assemble proteins, one amino acid at a time, from genetic instructions. Crick postulated that it would take three letters of the DNA code to describe amino acids.
After incredible work on biology at the molecular level, Crick "decided to attack something really hard", Collins noted. "The mind and the brain." The nature of consciousness is a solvable, if complex problem, Crick argued. "People think the brain is mysterious but not the weather. Why is that?" The brain may be less enigmatic than the weather, he said last year, because "we don't yet have a clear understanding of how raindrops form but we do know how individual neurons and synapses work."
His later work had its critics, although supporters insist that Crick was simply following questions where they led and posing hypotheses. He suggested Sigmund Freud was wrong about dreams and that they were simply the result of "cerebral house-cleaning" so the memory could store information more efficiently. In other words, "we dream in order to forget".
His 1981 book, Life Itself, postulated that life began on Earth when micro-organisms wafted in from spacecraft. The hypothesis, Crick noted, requires that "the earliest organisms should appear suddenly, without any sign of any precursors here on Earth". That is what the fossil record shows. But many scientists argue that the fossil record is incomplete and that the earliest life forms might have been too small to be preserved.
In his 1994 book, The Astonishing Hypothesis, he outlined an empirical approach focusing on visual consciousness, something that would lead to the death of the soul. "You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules... In the fullness of time educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death."
Francis Harry Compton Crick was born in Northampton. His parents bought the inquisitive boy a Children's Encyclopedia, which answered many questions for him, although he told his mother he worried that by the time he grew up, "everything was going to be discovered". He attended University College in London, earning a Bachelor's degree in physics in 1937. His graduate work was interrupted by the second World War when he worked for the Admiralty on magnetic underwater mines.
He knew no biology and practically no organic chemistry or crystallography, so he spent the post-war years learning those disciplines.
"I will always remember Francis for his extraordinarily focused intelligence and for the many ways he showed me kindness and developed my self-confidence," Watson said in a written statement last week. "For two years I was almost a family member, the much younger brother prone to intellectually stray. Sharing with him our office ... was an extraordinary privilege. Until his death, Francis was the person with whom I could most easily talk about ideas."
Crick did not welcome the attention that the Nobel brought, nor the limelight from Watson's best-selling The Double Helix. In person, colleagues said he was quick-witted and charming. But he refused to sit for most interviews or to travel to most award ceremonies and was known for responding to requests with a pre-printed postcard, with one of 13 boxes checked off which said he could not send an autograph, appear for an award, donate his time, or the like.
He worked at Cambridge until 1977, and then at the Salk Institute, California. His seven-year marriage to Ruth Doreen Dodd ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of 54 years, two sons and two daughters.
Francis Harry Compton Crick: born June 8th, 1916; died July 28th, 2004