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Portrait of Francis Crick

Science · Biology

Francis Crick

1916–2004 · British

Molecular biology; later neuroscience

Francis Crick was a British physicist-turned-biologist who, with James Watson at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, proposed the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953, drawing on X-ray data from Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. He shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Watson and Wilkins. He went on to formulate the "central dogma" of molecular biology and help crack the genetic code, before turning to the study of consciousness at the Salk Institute in California.

How to spot them

  • ▸Watson and Crick; the double helix; the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge
  • ▸The 'central dogma': DNA makes RNA makes protein
  • ▸Later work on consciousness: 'The Astonishing Hypothesis'
  • ▸Born in Northampton; died in San Diego, working at the Salk Institute

Key discoveries & works

Central dogma of molecular biology (1958)

Sequence information flows from nucleic acid to protein, never from protein back to nucleic acid

The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994)

Book arguing that the mind and consciousness are entirely the behaviour of nerve cells

Wobble hypothesis (1966)

Explained how one transfer RNA can recognise more than one codon

Triplet nature of the genetic code (with Sydney Brenner and others) (1961)

Experiments on bacteriophage mutants showed that the code is read in non-overlapping groups of three bases

Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (1981)

Book discussing directed panspermia, the idea (with Leslie Orgel) that life on Earth was seeded deliberately from elsewhere

Key ideas

  • Co-proposed the double-helix model of DNA with complementary base pairing (A with T, G with C), suggesting a copying mechanism
  • Central dogma: DNA to RNA to protein
  • Adaptor hypothesis: predicted small adaptor molecules (later identified as transfer RNA) link codons to amino acids

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Northampton in 1916; died in San Diego in 2004
  • •Trained as a physicist and worked on naval mines for the Admiralty during the Second World War
  • •The 1953 double-helix paper in Nature, with Watson, is barely one page long
  • •Shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins
  • •Watson's 'The Double Helix' says Crick announced in the Eagle pub in Cambridge that they had found 'the secret of life'
  • •Moved to the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, in 1976 to study the brain and consciousness
  • •The Francis Crick Institute in London, a biomedical research centre, is named after him

Drill it — 7 cards

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Sources