Francis Crick - Dead at 88. (July 30, 2004)

    Francis Crick, together with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins received the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the determination of the double helical structure of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA). He died in Thornton Hospital, La Jolla, California aged 88  after an extended struggle with colon cancer.

In 1953 he published together with James Watson a two page paper, Molecular structure of nucleic acids; a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid. (Watson J. D. & Crick F. H. C. Nature, 171. 737 - 738 (1953)) which profoundly altered the biomedical sciences to say nothing of modern forensic analysis.

Their paper's opening sentence is a classic example of studied English understatement:

    We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.

Born in Northampton, England, in 1916 Crick received a bachelor of science degree in physics from University College London in 1937. He helped to develop magnetic and acoustic mines for the British Navy during World War II. In 1954 he was awarded his Ph.D. at Cambridge for using x-ray crystallography to decipher protein structures.

 

Watson a fresh PhD in microbial genetics from Indiana University joined forces with Crick at Cambridge in 1951 and their combined knowledge and brilliance together with data supplied to them by Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin produced the twisted ladder model.

 

Crick left the United Kingdom in 1976 to become a professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, where he began investigating the nature of human consciousness.

 

 Richard Murphy, president of the Salk Institute has announced that a new Crick-Jacobs Center for Computational and Theoretical Biology will be established at the Institute to continue Crick's quest to understand the brain. Murphy says simply, "His name will be listed among Darwin and Mendel as one of the true greats of science."

 

Crick's Lecture on receiving the Nobel Prize at Stockholm on December 11, 1962 is online.