Francis Crick 1916–2004

In March 1953, 31 years after Howard Carter’s astonishing first glimpse into Tutankhamun's tomb, an even more golden treasure was found. Francis Crick and Jim Watson shared that moment of discovery as they looked, for the first time, into the heart of all living things. They saw the structure of DNA, and their vision became the big bang of modern biology. Francis’ life in research began inauspiciously: “When the war finally came to an end, I was at a loss as to what to do... I took stock of my qualifications — some knowledge of magnetism and hydrodynamics, neither subjects for which I felt the least bit of enthusiasm. No published papers at all... Only gradually did I realize that this lack of qualification could be an advantage. By the time most scientists have reached age thirty they are trapped by their own expertise. I, on the other hand, knew nothing, except for a basic training in somewhat oldfashioned physics and mathematics... I was sure in my mind that I wanted to do fundamental research.... But did I have the ability?” Francis Harry Compton Crick was the first of two sons born into the comfortable family of Harry Crick and Anne Elizabeth Wilkins in Northampton, England. Neither parent had been to university, his father running a shoe factory. He was educated at Northampton Grammar School and at Mill Hill School in London — a ‘public school’ in the English sense — and entered University College, London in 1934 to study physics, obtaining a B.Sc. (second class) in 1937. He started research for a Ph.D. under Professor E. N. da C. Andrade, studying the viscosity of water between 100° and 150°C (“the dullest project imaginable”) but, with the outbreak of war he moved to the Admiralty and spent the next several years working on the design of magnetic and acoustic mines. It was around early 1947 that he found himself searching for something worthwhile to do. Two areas fascinated him: the borderline area between the living and nonliving, and brain function and consciousness. He chose the former. “It was so late in my career that I knew I had to make the right choice the first time.” But finding a place to do this in 1947 was not so easy. Randall had set up a biophysics group in London and, when Francis visited his lab, Randall was not keen to hire him: he found Crick “rather boisterous and (he) talked too much”. Francis eventually found a place in Cambridge at the Strangeways laboratory on the edge of town. His first paper, with Arthur Hughes, was on the viscoelastic properties of the cytoplasm using fibroblasts provided by Honor Fell. They subjected ingested iron particles to changing magnetic fields and looked at how these particles moved in the cytoplasm. They envisaged the cytoplasm as like a “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’”. In 1949, thanks to Max Perutz, Francis moved to the centre of town, to the old Cavendish and the ‘MRC Unit for the Study of the Molecular Structure of Biological Systems’, joining Perutz and John Kendrew, who were trying to resolve the three-dimensional structures of haemoglobin and myoglobin. Here he found a scientific home; compared to Perutz (pensive and quiet) and Kendrew (retiring, mannered, a real air force officer), Francis was brash, loud and highly opinionated. He was also very clever, but ready to learn — especially from Lawrence Bragg who, with his father, had worked out how to determine molecular structures from X-ray diffraction. From him, Francis learned the key to discovery: identifying problems that were really worth solving. For those of us who were not around in the late 1940s to early 1950s, it is difficult to appreciate how vague everyone was about proteins, genes and their chemical natures. As genes specified structures in three dimensions it was often supposed that they would contain three-dimensional information. Not much was known about proteins — they were largely regarded as amorphous with no particular amino acid sequence. DNA was certainly not the centre of attention: “.....at the time, almost no-one thought that DNA might be of genetic interest — it was thought to be associated with genes in some way, but it was not the genetic material”. The quotations in this article are taken