Background

Francis Harry Compton Crick was born on June 8, 1916, in Weston Favell, Northamptonshire, United Kingdom, being the elder child of Harry Crick and Annie Elizabeth Wilkins. He had one brother, Anthony Foster Crick, who was a doctor in New Zealand. Francis Crick's grandfather, Walter Drawbridge Crick, was a shoemaker and amateur scientist. His Uncle Walter also had a fascination with science, and young Crick conducted some chemical experiments with him (and without him).

Education

Francis Crick started his education at Northampton Grammar School, moving to Mill Hill School in London as a boarder in 1925, where he had gained a scholarship. He flourished there, specializing in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. His contemporaries at Mill Hill remember him as a witty prankster, full of fun and cunning. For example, it was strictly forbidden to listen to the radio during evening prep hours; teachers patrolled the study corridors in search of violations. Francis wired up his home-made radio so that when the study door was opened, the electrical circuit would break, and the radio turn off. One day the teacher entered the study and shut the door behind him, remaining within. The radio did not restart - Crick had foreseen this possibility and inserted a manual control in his desk. During the school holidays, he made explosive devices - bottle bombs, glass bottles stuffed with explosives - which he ignited by remote control in his uncle Walter's garden, or he played tennis with his brother Anthony. However, he failed to pass the entrance examinations at Oxford or Cambridge, probably because of his lack of interest in learning the dead language, Latin, a requirement until around 1961.

Crick joined University College London to study physics in 1934; with lectures less than stimulating, he took up horse riding and led an active social life. His three years as an undergraduate ended with a good class II degree in 1937. Taking the path of the least resistance, he remained at UCL to study for a Doctor of Philosophy; the topic - how the viscosity of water changes at temperatures above 100 °C - was given to him by Professor Edward da Costa Andrade. Two years were spent building a high-pressure apparatus in which water's viscosity could be measured by the damping of an oscillator set in motion by an electronic circuit. This tedious project, ‘the dullest problem imaginable’ as he later described it, was initially interrupted by the outbreak of war and finally by a parachute landmine which fell on University College London.

In 1947 Crick knew no biology and practically no organic chemistry or crystallography, so that much of the next few years was spent in learning the elements of these subjects. During this period, together with William Cochran and Vladimir Vand he worked out the general theory of X-ray diffraction by a helix, and at the same time as Linus Pauling and Robert Brainard Corey, suggested that the alpha-keratin pattern was due to alpha-helices coiled round each other.

Crick became a research student for the second time in 1949, being accepted as a member of Caius College Cambridge, and obtained a Doctor of Philosophy in 1954 on a thesis entitled "X-ray diffraction: polypeptides and proteins."

Career

When World War II started Francis Crick was appointed, as a civilian, to work at the Admiralty Research Laboratory at Teddington, West London, in a group led by Harrie Massey. Their objectives were to find ways of neutralizing German magnetic mines and mine sweepers. Thus, as German submarines emerging from a French port were usually preceded by a minesweeper, the group devised a mine with a circuit which detected the strong magnetic field of the minesweeper as it passed over, after which a much more sensitive system was activated to detect and destroy the following submarine. Later, Germany developed the Sperrbrecher, a particularly effective minesweeper with a huge electromagnet suspended far ahead of the sweeper. Here, the trick was to make the detection device so insensitive that it only responded when the Sperrbrecher itself was directly above it. In all this, Crick's ingenuity and knowledge of physics, particularly electric circuitry and hydrodynamics were at play - an echo from his past youthful japes. After the war, he was transferred to the intelligence section and initially applied for a permanent post. However, he then decided to leave the Admiralty and change his direction radically.

With the end of the war, Crick found himself at a loose end, uncertain what to do with the rest of his life. Having read many popular scientific articles, covering physics, chemistry, and biology, he decided that his lack of expertise might be an advantage - he had a free choice and an open mind. One day he noticed that he was telling others about penicillin and antibiotics, of which he actually knew rather little. He realized that people chat about what they find interesting - the ‘gossip test.’ Applying this to his recent conversations, he narrowed his interests to the borderline between the living and non-living, and the brain. Each contained a mystery - what is life and what is consciousness? His knowledge of chemistry helped him choose the boundary between the living and non-living: he had read the little book by Erwin Schrödinger What is life?, which suggested to him that great discoveries were ‘just around the corner.’ Taking the advice of Edward Mellanby, the Secretary of the Medical Research Council (MRC), he went to Cambridge and joined the Strangeways Laboratory in late 1947 to work with Arthur Hughes measuring the viscosity of a cell's cytoplasm. Their experimental system used cultured chick fibroblasts that had taken up magnetic particles to observe how these particles behave in applied magnetic fields. Their conclusions, in his first publication, were that the cytoplasm is rather like Mother's Work Basket - a jumble of beads and buttons of all shapes and sizes, with pins and threads for good measure, all jostling about and held together by "colloidal forces." At the end of two years, Crick reported back to Mellanby, discovering that the MRC had just decided to establish a new unit in the Cavendish Laboratory, headed by Max Perutz, to study the structure of proteins using X-rays. Crick made his way there to join Perutz, John Kendrew, and Hugh Huxley as a graduate student attached to Gonville and Caius College in June 1949.

In 1951, Francis Crick met James Watson who was visiting Cambridge. Although Crick was twelve years older, he and Watson "hit it off immediately." Watson ended up staying at Cavendish, and using available X-ray data and model building, the two solved the structure of DNA. The classic paper was published in Nature in April 1953. A flip of the coin decided the order of the names on the paper. Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for solving the structure of DNA. Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin provided some of the X-ray crystallographic data.

After the "double helix" model, there were still questions about how DNA directed the synthesis of proteins. Crick and some of his fellow scientists, including James Watson, were members of the informal "RNA tie club," whose purpose was "to solve the riddle of RNA structure, and to understand the way it builds proteins." The club focused on the "Central Dogma" where DNA was the storehouse of genetic information and RNA was the bridge that transferred this information from the nucleus to the cytoplasm where proteins were made. The theory of RNA coding was debated and discussed, and in 1961, Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner provided genetic proof that a triplet code was used in reading genetic material.

For most of his career, Crick was at Cambridge working for the Medical Research Council. In 1976, Crick moved to the Salk Institute in La Jolla where he focused his research on developmental neurobiology. In 1988, he wrote about his experiences in What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery.

Achievements

• Francis Crick received recognition through a number of awards in his lifetime for his contributions to molecular biology, including the Lasker Award in 1960, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine that he shared with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins in 1962 for their discovery of the molecular structure of DNA and its importance in transferring information in living organisms, and in 1975 the Copley medal from The Royal Society in the United Kingdom.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature

    (The book addresses the ultimate scientific question of th...)

    1981
  • Kreiseliana: About and Around Georg Kreisel

    (This multifaceted collection of essays, reminiscences, an...)

    1996
  • What Mad Pursuit

    (Candid, provocative, and disarming, this is the widely-pr...)

    1990
  • Of Molecules and Men

    (There is probably no one who has a deeper understanding o...)

    1967
  • The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul 1995

Religion

Crick described himself as agnostic, with a "strong inclination towards atheism." He was highly critical of organized religion, especially Christianity, and thought it should be replaced with humanism.

Politics

Francis Crick wasn't involved in politics and his political views aren't widely known.

Views

In 1951, when the American biologist James Watson arrived at the Medical Research Council Unit at the Cavendish Laboratories, it was known that the mysterious nucleic acids, especially DNA, played a central role in the hereditary determination of the structure and function of each cell. Watson convinced Crick that knowledge of DNA’s three-dimensional structure would make its hereditary role apparent. Using the X-ray diffraction studies of DNA done by Wilkins and X-ray diffraction pictures produced by Rosalind Franklin, Watson and Crick were able to construct a molecular model consistent with the known physical and chemical properties of DNA. The model consisted of two intertwined helical (spiral) strands of sugar-phosphate, bridged horizontally by flat organic bases. Watson and Crick theorized that if the strands were separated, each would serve as a template (pattern) for the formation, from small molecules in the cell, of a new sister strand identical to its former partner. This copying process explained the replication of the gene and, eventually, the chromosome, known to occur in dividing cells. Their model also indicated that the sequence of bases along the DNA molecule spells some kind of code "read" by a cellular mechanism that translates it into the specific proteins responsible for a cell’s particular structure and function.

By 1961 Crick had evidence to show that each group of three bases (a codon) on a single DNA strand designates the position of a specific amino acid on the backbone of a protein molecule. He also helped to determine which codons code for each of the 20 amino acids normally found in protein and thus helped clarify the way in which the cell eventually uses the DNA “message” to build proteins.

Crick and Watson also theorized on the structure of viruses. Without Watson, Crick has worked on the structures of polyglycine II and collagen, and researched protein synthesis, the genetic code, and acridine-type mutants. After receiving the Nobel Prize Crick refocused his studies on finding neural correlate of consciousness. Crick argued that everything that goes on in our heads can be explained by the behavior of billions of nerve cells; most controversially he deduced (from evidence of people whose brains had been damaged) that free will comprises a bundle of cells on the inside top surface at the front of the brain.

Membership

Francis Crick was a member of the Royal Society, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the French Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the European Molecular Biology Organization.

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  Royal Society , United Kingdom

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  German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , Germany

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  French Academy of Sciences , France

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  American Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

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  National Academy of Sciences , United States

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  European Molecular Biology Organization

Personality

Among his colleagues, Francis Crick gained a reputation as a clear and incisive thinker; within the military he was seen as impatient, arrogant and insubordinate. Crick has been described as having a keen intellect and a dry, British sense of humor.

Physical Characteristics: In 2001, Crick was diagnosed with colon cancer. The decease became a case of his death in 2004.

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Linus Pauling, Erwin Schrödinger

• Sport & Clubs

  tennis

Connections

In 1940 Crick married Ruth Doreen Dodd. Their son, Michael Francis Compton Crick is a scientist. They were divorced in 1947. In 1949 Crick married Odile Speed. They have two daughters, Gabrielle Anne Crick and Jacqueline Marie-Therese Crick. The family lived in a house appropriately called «The Golden Helix», in which Crick liked to find his recreation in conversation with his friends.

Father:

Harry Crick

Mother:

Annie Elizabeth Wilkins

Brother:

Anthony Crick

ex-wife:

Ruth Doreen Dodd

Grandfather:

Walter Crick

Uncle:

Walter Crick Jr.

Son:

Michael Francis Compton Crick

Wife:

Odile Speed

Daughter:

Gabrielle Anne Crick

Daughter:

Jacqueline Marie-Therese Crick Nichols

Friend:

James Watson

A critical influence in Crick’s career was his friendship, beginning in 1951, with J. D. Watson, then a young man of 23, leading in 1953 to the proposal of the double-helical structure for DNA and the replication scheme. Crick and Watson subsequently suggested a general theory for the structure of small viruses.

References

• The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA
  2001
• Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code
  2009
• Francis Crick and James Watson: And the Building Blocks of Life
  1998
• Francis Crick: Hunter of Life's Secrets
  2009