Francis Harry Compton Crick (8 June 1916 – 28 July 2004) was an English scientist who studied biology, the physical properties of living things, and the brain. He, along with James Watson, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins, helped discover the twisted shape of the DNA molecule.
In 1953, Crick and Watson published a paper in the journal Nature that explained the structure and function of DNA. Along with Maurice Wilkins, they shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on the structure of DNA and RNA and how they help transfer information in living organisms.
Crick was a key scientist in studying DNA’s structure. He introduced the term "central dogma" to describe how information moves from DNA to proteins and cannot return to DNA. This means the final step of transferring information from DNA to proteins is permanent.
Later in his career, Crick worked as a research professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California. His later studies focused on the brain and nervous system, and he explored ways to understand human consciousness. He held this position until his death in 2004. According to Christof Koch, Crick was still working on a scientific manuscript when he died, showing his dedication to science until the end.
Early life and education
Francis Crick was the first child of Harry Crick and Annie Elizabeth Crick (born Wilkins). He was born on June 8, 1916, and grew up in Weston Favell, a small village near Northampton, England. His father and uncle owned a factory that made boots and shoes. His grandfather, Walter Drawbridge Crick, was an amateur naturalist who studied tiny sea creatures called foraminifera. He wrote about them and communicated with the scientist Charles Darwin. Two types of snails or slugs were named after him.
As a young boy, Francis was interested in science and learned about it from books. His parents took him to church, but by age 12, he said he no longer wanted to go. He preferred finding answers through science rather than religion.
Francis’s uncle, Walter Crick, lived on Abington Avenue. In his garden, he taught Francis to blow glass, do chemistry experiments, and make photographs. At age 8 or 9, Francis moved to the Northampton Grammar School, which was about 1.25 miles (2 kilometers) from his home. He walked or took a bus to school. Later, he rode a bicycle. The teachers in the higher classes were good but not very exciting. After age 14, Francis studied at Mill Hill School in London, where he earned a scholarship to learn math, physics, and chemistry. He studied with his best friend, John Shilston. He won the Walter Knox Prize for Chemistry on July 7, 1933, and said the award was because of the quality of teaching at Mill Hill.
Francis studied at University College London (UCL), which is part of the University of London. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1937. He started a PhD at UCL but was interrupted by World War II. Later, he became a PhD student and an Honorary Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He worked mainly at the Cavendish Laboratory and the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He was also an Honorary Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, and at University College London.
Francis began a PhD project at UCL to study how water’s thickness changes at high temperatures. He later called this work "the dullest problem imaginable." His research was led by physicist Edward Neville da Costa Andrade. However, during World War II, a bomb hit the laboratory where he worked, destroying his equipment. This event changed his path from physics to other fields. During his second year as a PhD student, he won the Carey Foster Research Prize, a major honor. He later did research work at the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute, which is now part of New York University Tandon School of Engineering.
During World War II, Francis worked for the Admiralty Research Laboratory. Many important scientists worked there, including David Bates, Robert Boyd, Thomas Gaskell, George Deacon, John Gunn, Harrie Massey, and Nevill Mott. Francis helped design magnetic and acoustic mines, and he played a key role in creating a new mine that was effective against German minesweepers.
Post-World War II life and work
In 1947, at the age of 31, Crick started studying biology and joined a group of physical scientists who moved into biological research. This movement was possible because physicists like Sir John Randall, who helped win World War II with inventions such as radar, gained influence. Crick had to change from the "simple and elegant nature" of physics to the "complex chemical processes" that natural selection developed over billions of years. He described this change as "almost like being born again." Crick believed that studying physics taught him about the dangers of overconfidence and made him think that if physics had achieved great success, similar progress could happen in other fields like biology. This belief made him more willing to take risks than many biologists, who often focused on biology’s difficult problems rather than past successes in physics.
For about two years, Crick studied the physical properties of cytoplasm at Cambridge’s Strangeways Research Laboratory, led by Honor Bridget Fell, with support from the Medical Research Council. Later, he joined Max Perutz and John Kendrew at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, which was directed by Sir Lawrence Bragg. Bragg had won the Nobel Prize in 1915 at age 25. He played a key role in the race to discover DNA’s structure, which was also a competition with Linus Pauling, an American chemist who had previously discovered the alpha helix structure of proteins. At the same time, Bragg’s Cavendish Laboratory competed with King’s College London, where the Biophysics department was led by Sir John Randall. Randall had refused Crick’s request to work at King’s College. Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins from King’s College were friends, and their relationship influenced later scientific events as much as Crick’s close friendship with James Watson. Crick and Wilkins first met at King’s College, not, as incorrectly stated by two authors, during World War II at the Admiralty.
In 1995, Francis Crick signed the Ashley Montagu Resolution, which asked the International Court of Justice (formerly the World Court) to help stop harmful genital modifications of children, including female genital mutilation, circumcision, and penile subincision.
Personal life
Francis Crick married twice and had three children. His brother, Anthony, who was born in 1918, died before him in 1966.
Francis Crick died from colon cancer on the morning of July 28, 2004, at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Thornton Hospital in La Jolla. After his death, he was cremated, and his ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean. A public memorial event was held on September 27, 2004, at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, near San Diego, California. Speakers at the event included scientists such as James Watson, Sydney Brenner, Alex Rich, Seymour Benzer, Aaron Klug, Christof Koch, Pat Churchland, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Tomaso Poggio, Leslie Orgel, Terry Sejnowski, his son Michael Crick, and his daughter Jacqueline Nichols. A private memorial for family and colleagues was held on August 3, 2004.
In June 2013, Crick’s Nobel Prize medal and diploma were sold at Heritage Auctions for $2,270,000. The buyer was Jack Wang, the CEO of a Chinese medical company called Biomobie. Twenty percent of the sale price was donated to the Francis Crick Institute in London.
Research
Francis Crick was interested in two important questions in biology: how life begins from non-living matter, and how the brain creates awareness. He believed his background in physics made him well-suited to study the first question, so he focused on biophysics. In 1946, Crick read a book by Erwin Schrödinger called What Is Life? and was influenced by Linus Pauling to switch from physics to biology. Scientists knew that strong chemical bonds in DNA could help store genetic information in cells. Finding the exact molecule that carried this information was the next step for biologists. Crick believed that combining Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Gregor Mendel’s genetics, and knowledge of molecular biology would explain life. He thought life could soon be created in a lab, but some researchers, like Esther Lederberg, disagreed.
Scientists thought a large molecule, like a protein, might carry genetic information. However, proteins were known to perform structural and functional roles in cells, not store genetic data. In the 1940s, evidence suggested DNA, a key part of chromosomes, might be the genetic molecule. In 1944, Oswald Avery and his team showed that giving bacteria a specific DNA molecule could change their traits.
Some scientists believed DNA was not important enough to store genetic information, thinking proteins were more likely. In 1949, Crick joined Max Perutz’s research group at the University of Cambridge to study X-ray crystallography, a method to reveal molecular structures. X-ray crystallography could help scientists see the shapes of large molecules like proteins and DNA, but technical challenges made it difficult to use at the time.
Crick taught himself the math behind X-ray crystallography. During this time, researchers studied the twisted shape of amino acid chains in proteins, called the alpha helix. Linus Pauling discovered that each turn of the alpha helix had 3.6 amino acids. Crick observed mistakes made by his colleagues when trying to model the alpha helix, which taught him about the importance of rigid molecular structures, such as those found in DNA.
In 1951 and 1952, Crick worked with William Cochran and Vladimir Vand to develop a theory about X-ray diffraction in helical molecules. This theory matched X-ray data from proteins with alpha helices and later helped scientists study DNA.
In late 1951, Crick began working with James Watson at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Using X-ray images of DNA taken by Rosalind Franklin and her student Raymond Gosling (shared by Franklin’s colleague Wilkins), Watson and Crick created a model of DNA’s structure. They published their findings in 1953 and were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962, along with Wilkins.
When Watson arrived in Cambridge, Crick was a 35-year-old graduate student, while Watson was 23 and had already earned a PhD. Both were interested in how genetic information is stored in molecules. Watson and Crick discussed DNA constantly and tried to guess its structure. Key data came from Franklin’s X-ray images. In 1951, Wilkins shared Franklin’s findings with Watson and Crick, but Franklin disagreed with their conclusions about DNA’s helical shape. Franklin’s chemical knowledge helped Watson and Crick correct their first model, which had the wrong placement of DNA’s phosphate groups.
Crick believed that Wilkins and Franklin’s lack of collaboration delayed progress. With permission from their mentors, Watson and Crick used Franklin’s unpublished X-ray images and data from a progress report to build their model. Some debate whether Watson and Crick should have used Franklin’s data without her consent or before she published her results.
Controversy
Watson and Crick used DNA X-ray diffraction data collected by Franklin and Wilkins, which led to a long-lasting controversy. This happened because some of Franklin's unpublished data were used without her knowledge or permission by Watson and Crick when they created the double helix model of DNA. Among the four DNA researchers, only Franklin had a chemistry degree; Wilkins and Crick studied physics, and Watson studied biology.
Before publishing their discovery of the double helix structure, Watson and Crick had little direct contact with Franklin. However, they knew about her work, more than she realized. Watson attended a lecture in November 1951 where Franklin explained the two forms of DNA, type A and type B, and described the location of phosphate units on the outside of the molecule. In January 1953, Watson saw an X-ray photograph of B-DNA (called photograph 51) from Wilkins. Wilkins had received photograph 51 from Franklin’s PhD student, Raymond Gosling. Wilkins and Gosling had worked together in the Medical Research Council’s (MRC) Biophysics Unit before director John Randall assigned Franklin to take over DNA diffraction work and supervise Gosling’s thesis. Randall did not clearly explain Franklin’s appointment to others, which caused confusion and tension between Wilkins and Franklin. In February 1953, Crick’s advisor, Max Perutz, gave Crick a report from a December 1952 MRC committee visit to King’s College, which included Franklin’s crystallographic calculations. Franklin was unaware that photograph 51 and other data had been shared with Crick and Watson. She wrote three draft manuscripts, two of which described a double helical DNA backbone. Her two manuscripts on form A DNA were sent to Acta Crystallographica in Copenhagen on March 6, 1953, one day before Crick and Watson completed their model.
The X-ray diffraction images collected by Gosling and Franklin provided the strongest evidence that DNA has a helical shape. Before this, Linus Pauling, Watson, and Crick had created incorrect models with the molecule’s chains inside and bases pointing outward. Franklin’s experimental results showed how much water was in DNA crystals, which supported the idea that the sugar-phosphate backbones are on the outside of the molecule. Franklin’s X-ray photograph showed that the backbones must be on the outside. Although she initially said her data did not prove DNA has a helical structure, her 1953 drafts argued for a double helical DNA backbone. Using her manuscripts, Franklin discovered that form A DNA has antiparallel backbones, which supported the double helix structure. She did this by identifying the space group for DNA crystals. This helped Watson and Crick decide to look for models with two antiparallel polynucleotide strands.
In summary, Watson and Crick had three sources of Franklin’s unpublished data: 1) her 1951 seminar, which Watson attended, 2) discussions with Wilkins, who worked in the same laboratory as Franklin, and 3) a research progress report meant to coordinate MRC-supported laboratories. Watson, Crick, Wilkins, and Franklin all worked in MRC laboratories.
Watson and Crick believed they benefited from working with Wilkins. They offered him co-authorship on the article that first described the double helix structure of DNA. Wilkins refused, which may have led to the brief mention of King’s College’s experimental work in the published paper. Instead of making any King’s College researchers co-authors on the Watson and Crick paper, two additional papers from King’s College were published alongside the helix paper. Brenda Maddox suggests Franklin should have been listed as a co-author on the original Watson and Crick paper in Nature because her experimental results were important to their model. Franklin and Gosling submitted their own joint "second" paper to Nature at the same time as Wilkins, Stokes, and Wilson submitted theirs (the "third" paper on DNA).
Watson described Franklin negatively in his book The Double Helix, making it seem like she was Wilkins’ assistant and unable to interpret her own data. However, historian Nathaniel C. Comfort notes that Franklin’s colleague Aaron Klug believed she was "two steps away" from discovering the double helix. After analyzing her lab notebook, Klug stated she likely would have solved it.
The X-ray diffraction images collected by Franklin provided the strongest evidence that DNA has a helical shape. Although her work helped Crick and Watson create a correct model, Franklin could not recognize its importance at the time. When she left King’s College, Director Sir John Randall insisted all DNA work belonged to King’s and told Franklin not to think about it anymore. Because of this, the scientific community did not fully understand how much Franklin contributed. Later, Franklin did important research on the tobacco mosaic virus in J. D. Bernal’s lab at Birkbeck College, which expanded ideas about helical structures.
Crick sometimes shared his views on eugenics in private letters. For example, he supported a form of positive eugenics where wealthy parents would be encouraged to have more children. He once said, "In the long run, society will have to worry about the next generation’s character. People have many religious beliefs, so it would be risky to try eugenics now. I would be surprised if society did not eventually try to improve the next generation in some way."
Biologist Nancy Hopkins said that when she was an undergraduate in the 1960s, Crick touched her during a lab visit. She described the event: "Before I could rise and shake hands, he came across the room, stood behind me, put his hands on my breasts, and asked, 'What are you working on?'"
Views on religion
Francis Crick described himself as a humanist, meaning he believed that human problems should be solved using human knowledge and values, without needing help from things beyond the physical world. He believed that humanism should replace religion as the main guide for people, writing:
Human challenges are not new. We live on a planet in a distant part of the universe, and our ability to think and ask questions makes it hard for us to accept life without understanding it. We want to know why we exist, what the world is made of, and what we are made of. In the past, religion answered these questions, but now we know that most of those answers are likely incorrect, based on human mistakes and misunderstandings. Religious stories now seem like simple tales told to children, and even when viewed as symbols, they often seem confusing or unpleasant. Humanists live in a world that is full of mystery and discovery, and once people see this, they may find old religious ideas seem outdated and unconvincing.
Crick was especially critical of Christianity. He said he did not respect Christian beliefs and thought they were not correct. He believed that removing religious ideas would help people focus on understanding the world. He once joked that Christianity might be acceptable for adults in private but should not be taught to children.
In his book Of Molecules and Men, Crick discussed how science and religion relate. He suggested that a computer might one day be programmed to have a soul and asked when the first living thing gained a soul or when a baby gains a soul. He believed that the idea of a non-physical soul that exists after death is just an imagined idea. Crick thought the mind is the result of physical brain activity, which evolved naturally over millions of years. He believed that schools should teach evolution by natural selection and that it was unfortunate that some schools required religious instruction. He predicted that as scientists learn more about the brain, old religious ideas about the soul and the world would no longer be accepted. He called himself a skeptic and an agnostic but said he leaned toward atheism.
In 1960, Crick accepted an honorary position at Churchill College, Cambridge, partly because the college did not have a chapel. Later, when a donation was made to build a chapel, Crick left his position in protest.
In 1969, Crick took part in a celebration marking the 100th year of the journal Nature. He made predictions about future developments in molecular biology, which were published in Nature. He briefly mentioned the search for life on other planets but thought it unlikely that life would be found by the year 2000. He also proposed a field called "biochemical theology," suggesting that prayer might cause measurable changes in brain chemicals. This idea is now studied in a field called neurotheology. Crick’s views on science and religion influenced his work as he shifted from biology to neuroscience.
In 1998, Crick asked, "If parts of the Bible are clearly wrong, why should we accept the rest without question? What is more important than finding our true place in the universe by removing old, incorrect beliefs?"
In 2003, Crick signed the Humanist Manifesto, a statement supporting humanism. He strongly opposed young Earth creationism, which claims the Earth is only a few thousand years old. In the 1987 U.S. Supreme Court case Edwards v. Aguillard, Crick joined other Nobel laureates in stating that "creation-science" should not be taught in public schools. He also supported making Darwin Day, which honors Charles Darwin’s birthday, a British national holiday.
Directed panspermia
During the 1960s, Crick focused on how the genetic code began. In 1966, Crick spoke at a meeting where Leslie Orgel was originally scheduled to present about the origin of life. Crick suggested possible steps by which a simple genetic code with only a few types of amino acids might have developed into the more complex code found in living organisms today. At that time, scientists believed proteins were the only type of enzyme, and ribozymes had not yet been discovered. Many molecular biologists were confused about how a complex system for making proteins, similar to what exists in living organisms now, could have first appeared. In the early 1970s, Crick and Orgel proposed that the formation of living systems from molecules might be a rare event in the universe. However, once life developed, it could be spread across space by intelligent beings using technology, a theory they called "directed panspermia." In a later review, Crick and Orgel admitted they had been too pessimistic about the possibility of life forming on Earth when they assumed a self-replicating protein system was the starting point for life.
In 1976, Crick, along with Sydney Brenner, Aaron Klug, and George Pieczenik, wrote a paper about the origin of protein synthesis. They suggested that certain rules about nucleotide sequences in DNA might allow protein production without the need for a ribosome. This process would require a specific interaction between mRNA and tRNA involving five bases, with the anti-codon flipping to form a triplet code. Thomas H. Jukes noted that the rules governing mRNA sequences for this process are still present today.
Neuroscience and other interests
Francis Crick's time at the University of Cambridge was the most important part of his scientific career. He left Cambridge in 1977 after working there for 30 years. He was offered the position of Mastership of Gonville and Caius College but chose not to accept it. In 2003, James Watson spoke at a Cambridge conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA’s structure. He said that the University of Cambridge had kept a secret for many years: in 1958, they turned down Francis Crick when he applied to become the Professor of Genetics. Some people at the university may have had reasons for rejecting him, but they avoided pushing themselves to the edge of scientific discovery.
This information was already written about in a book called Designs For Life: Molecular Biology After World War II by Soraya De Chadarevian, published in 2002. Details about Crick’s work in molecular biology at Cambridge are also found in The History of the University of Cambridge: Volume 4 (1870 to 1990), published in 1992.
According to the University of Cambridge’s genetics department website, the people who chose the professor of genetics could not agree on a candidate. The then-University Vice-Chancellor, Lord Adrian, tried to help by offering the position to Guido Pontecorvo, who refused. Lord Adrian then offered the position to Crick, who also refused.
In 1976, Crick took a one-year break from his work at Cambridge to study at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California. He had been a nonresident member of the institute since 1960. Crick said he felt comfortable in Southern California. After his break, he left Cambridge to continue working at the Salk Institute. He also taught as an adjunct professor at the University of California, San Diego. Crick taught himself about the brain’s structure and studied many areas of neuroscience. He stayed focused on molecular biology for many years because exciting discoveries, like the process of alternative splicing and the development of restriction enzymes (which helped make genetic engineering possible), kept drawing his attention. By the 1980s, he shifted his focus completely to studying consciousness. His book What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery explains why he left molecular biology and moved to neuroscience.
When Crick began working in theoretical neuroscience, he noticed several important things. He wanted to help neuroscience by encouraging scientists from different fields to work together on problems related to consciousness. He also worked with neurophilosophers like Patricia Churchland. In 1983, Crick and Mitchison proposed that REM sleep and dreaming help the brain remove certain types of connections between nerve cells in the brain’s cortex. They called this process “reverse learning” or “unlearning.” Later in his career, Crick worked closely with Christof Koch, and together they published many articles about consciousness from 1990 to 2005. Crick focused on how the brain creates visual awareness quickly, within a few hundred milliseconds of seeing something. He and Koch suggested that consciousness is hard to understand because it involves short-term memory processes that are not yet fully understood. In his book The Astonishing Hypothesis, Crick said that neuroscience had advanced enough to study consciousness at the molecular, cellular, and behavioral levels. He was unsure whether computer models of the mind would help unless they were based on detailed knowledge of the brain’s structure and function.
In a letter to Martynas Yčas in April 1996, Crick wrote:
“I don’t think we will fully understand consciousness by the end of this century, but it’s possible we might get a glimpse of the answer by then. Whether we will solve the mystery completely, as scientists did with molecular biology, or need a completely new way of thinking, only time will tell. Best wishes, Yours, Francis. P.S. By the way, I have not been knighted.”
Awards and honours
Francis Crick received many awards and honors in addition to his share of the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. These included the Royal and Copley medals from the Royal Society in 1972 and 1975, and the Order of Merit in 1991. He declined a CBE in 1963, though he was sometimes incorrectly called "Sir Francis Crick" or "Lord Crick." He became an EMBO Member in 1964.
The Nobel Prizes awarded to John Kendrew, Max Perutz, and to Crick, Watson, and Wilkins were mocked in a short sketch on the BBC TV show That Was The Week That Was. The sketch joked that the Nobel Prizes were called "The Alfred Nobel Peace Pools."
Crick was elected to several prestigious groups, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1962, the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1969, and the American Philosophical Society in 1972.
In 2003, the Francis Crick Medal and Lecture was created after a donation from Sydney Brenner, his former colleague and a 2002 Nobel Prize winner. The lecture is given yearly in any area of biological science, with a focus on fields Crick studied. It is intended for younger scientists, typically under 40 or at a similar career stage. By 2019, the lectures had been delivered by scientists such as Julie Ahringer, Dario Alessi, Ewan Birney, and others.
The Francis Crick Institute is a £660 million biomedical research center in central London, United Kingdom. It is a partnership between Cancer Research UK, Imperial College London, King's College London, the Medical Research Council, University College London, and the Wellcome Trust. Completed in 2016, it is the largest biomedical research and innovation center in Europe.
The University of Cambridge Graduate School of Biological, Medical, and Veterinary Sciences hosts the Francis Crick Graduate Lectures. The first two lectures were given by John Gurdon and Tim Hunt.