Francis Crick

Francis Harry Compton Crick was born on June 8, 1916, in Weston Favell, near Northampton, England. He studied physics at University College London, graduating in 1937. During World War II he worked on the design of mines for the British Admiralty. The wartime interruption left him needing to reestablish his scientific career, and he pivoted toward biology, influenced by Erwin Schrödinger's 1944 book What is Life?

In 1947, Crick began graduate study at Cambridge, initially at the Strangeways Laboratory and then at the Medical Research Council Unit at the Cavendish Laboratory. He met James Watson, a young American geneticist, in 1951 when Watson arrived at the Cavendish. Despite the fact that neither Watson nor Crick had been formally assigned to work on DNA, they embarked together on an effort to determine its structure using a combination of model building, X-ray crystallography data, and the chemical knowledge then available.

The critical X-ray diffraction data came from Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins at King's College London, particularly Franklin's high-resolution photograph known as Photo 51. Watson saw this image in early 1953, and it provided key insights about the dimensions and symmetry of the molecule. Crick's strong background in X-ray diffraction theory proved essential in interpreting the structural implications.

On February 28, 1953, Watson and Crick completed their model of DNA as a double helix: two strands of nucleotides wound around each other in opposite directions, with the bases paired in a specific complementary fashion (adenine with thymine, cytosine with guanine). Their short paper was published in Nature on April 25, 1953. The structure immediately suggested a mechanism for genetic replication, as Crick and Watson noted in the paper's famously understated closing sentence.

In 1962, Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Franklin had died in 1958 and was not eligible, as Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously.

Crick continued to make major contributions to molecular biology throughout the 1950s and 1960s, including foundational work on the genetic code. In 1977, he moved to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, where he devoted the rest of his career to the study of consciousness and the neural basis of visual perception.

Francis Crick died on July 28, 2004, in San Diego, California.