Historical Figure
Francis Crick
1916–2004
English physicist and biologist (1916–2004)
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Biography
Francis Harry Compton Crick was an English molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist. He, James Watson, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins played crucial roles in deciphering the helical structure of the DNA molecule.
Timeline
The story of Francis Crick, told in moments.
Working on a physics PhD at University College London when a German bomb destroys his laboratory equipment. He spends the war designing mines for the Admiralty. After the war he's 30 with no PhD and wonders what to do with his life. He settles on two problems: the secret of life and the mystery of consciousness.
Publishes a two-page paper in Nature with James Watson describing the double helix structure of DNA. The key insight comes from X-ray diffraction images taken by Rosalind Franklin. Crick reportedly walks into the Eagle pub in Cambridge and announces they've "found the secret of life." He is 36.
Wins the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Watson and Maurice Wilkins. Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at age 37, possibly from radiation exposure during her X-ray crystallography work. The Nobel is not awarded posthumously.
Dies of colon cancer in La Jolla, California, at 88. He spent his last decades at the Salk Institute working on consciousness. He was editing a manuscript on his deathbed. "A scientist until the bitter end," his colleague said.
In Their Own Words (15)
There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.
1994
Our brains have evolved mainly to deal with our body and its interactions with the world it senses to be around us. Is this world real? This is a venerable philosophical issue and I do not wish to be embroiled in the finely honed squabbles to which it has led. I merely state my own working hypothesis: that there is indeed an outside world, and that it is largely independent of our observing it. We can never fully know this outside world, but we can obtain approximate information about some aspects of its properties by using our senses and our brain.
1994
Philosophers have been especially concerned with the problem of consciousness—for example, how to explain the redness of red or the painfulness of pain. This is a very thorny issue. The problem springs from the fact that the redness of red that I perceive so vividly cannot be precisely communicated to another human being, at least in the ordinary course of events. If you cannot describe the properties of a thing unambiguously, you are likely to have some difficulty trying to explain these properties in reductionist terms.
1994
Before I describe in more detail exactly what is involved in seeing, let me make three general remarks.
1994
My own prejudices are exactly the opposite of the functionalists’: “If you want to understand function, study structure,” I was supposed to have said in my molecular biology days. (I believe I was sailing at the time.) I think that one should approach these problems at all levels, as was done in molecular biology. Classical genetics is, after all, a black-box subject. The important thing was to combine it with biochemistry. In nature hybrid species are usually sterile, but in science the reverse is often true. Hybrid subjects are often astonishingly fertile, whereas if a scientific discipline remains too pure it usually wilts.
1988
Artifacts (15)
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