Life itself. Francis
Crick was fascinated by life. How did life begin? What is the inherent
difference between living beings and inanimate objects? What is the nature of
consciousness? Crick substantially attacked each of these questions and cracked
the genetic code during his long career. Not bad for a man who was an average
student and began graduate school in his thirties.
From
shoes to mines. Born to a middle-class family in Northampton, England,
on June 8, 1916, Francis Crick did not seem destined for greatness, but he was
also not fated for the family business of selling shoes. He studied physics at
the University College of London, but his graduate career was interrupted by
WWII. Crick contributed to the war by helping to design mines and mine
countermeasures for the Navy.
DNA
calling. When Crick's graduate career resumed, he found a
position at Cambridge
University studying the
structure of proteins (or at least that is what he was supposed to be doing).
Instead, his mind wandered to the structure of another molecule, DNA.
Enter Watson.
Crick was more of a theorist than an experimentalist, and most of his
contributions to science were the result of long and spirited scientific
discussions that would result in near prophetic hypotheses. Most of his early colleagues
generally thought Crick was much too talkative. However, a young American scientist
was eager to engage in such discussions, and, fortunately for Crick, James Watson was also interested in DNA.
The
discovery. Inspired by the model making of Linus Pauling, Watson
and Crick began making a model of DNA structure. Their first attempt was a
failure. The errors in their structure were obvious to Rosalind Franklin, an X-ray
crystallographer who had also been working on DNA structure. With the help of
one of her photographs of DNA and insights from other researchers, Watson and
Crick tweaked their model into its now famous form. It was not immediately
embraced by the scientific community, but over time it became clear that they
were right. In 1962, they were awarded the Nobel Prize.
Cracking the code. Crick was an outspoken atheist, but his ability to collate data from
multiple sources into a coherent, and often accurate, theory could seem at
times to be the result of divine inspiration. It was Crick who confirmed the triplet code of
DNA, theorized the existence of an adapter molecule (tRNA), and proposed the
central dogma of molecular biology, that information travels from DNA to RNA to
protein.
Onto
the mind. In his sixties, Crick embarked on a new endeavor. He
had always been interested in studying the brain and understanding
consciousness, and the opportunity came when he moved to California and joined the Salk Institute. He
never had a breakthrough in this field comparable to that of DNA, but he
theorized a framework for studying consciousness and wrote a book, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific
Search for the Soul. This work occupied him until his death from colon cancer
at age 88 on Monday, July 26, 2004.