Crick Dies: DNA Double Helix Co-Discoverer at Rest

Francis Crick and James Watson used someone else's X-ray photograph. Rosalind Franklin, working at King's College London, had taken Photo 51, an X-ray diffraction image of DNA's B-form that clearly showed a helical structure. Her colleague Maurice Wilkins showed the image to Watson without her knowledge or permission. Crick and Watson built their double helix model at Cambridge from this data and from Franklin's unpublished measurements. Their paper in Nature, published April 25, 1953, acknowledged Franklin's contribution in a single sentence. Born in Northampton, England on June 8, 1916, Crick had studied physics before switching to biology after the war, a transition he later described as moving from the boring to the fascinating. Watson, an American prodigy, had earned his Ph.D. at 22 and arrived at Cambridge eager to solve what both men called the secret of life. Their model was elegant: two sugar-phosphate backbones spiraling in opposite directions, connected by pairs of bases, adenine with thymine and guanine with cytosine. The base-pairing rule immediately suggested how DNA could replicate itself: unzip the double helix and each strand becomes a template for building its complement. The structure explained both the storage and transmission of genetic information. It was one of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. Crick, Watson, and Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Franklin died of ovarian cancer on April 16, 1958, at 37, almost certainly caused by exposure to the X-ray radiation she used in her research. She was four years too early to be eligible for the Nobel, which is not awarded posthumously. The extent to which her work was used without proper credit remained a point of controversy for decades. Crick spent the latter part of his career at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, where he turned to neuroscience and the study of consciousness. He published a book, The Astonishing Hypothesis, arguing that consciousness arises from the behavior of neurons. He died of colon cancer on July 28, 2004, at 88. A draft of a paper on consciousness was on his desk.