Francis Crick
Francis Harry Compton Crick is best associated with the co-discovery of the structure of DNA, a finding that reshaped the life sciences in the twentieth century. He also authored Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature, a work in which he set out his thinking on the origins of life.
Born on 8 June 1916 in Northampton, United Kingdom, Crick received his early schooling at Northampton School for Boys and Mill Hill School before pursuing higher education at University College London and, subsequently, at the University of Cambridge and Gonville and Caius College. Trained across several overlapping disciplines — physics, biophysics, biochemistry, and molecular biology — he worked as a biologist, geneticist, neuroscientist, and university teacher over the course of his career. This broad scientific formation placed him at the intersection of the physical and biological sciences at a moment when those fields were converging on the molecular structure of hereditary material.
The co-discovery of the structure of DNA brought Crick considerable recognition from the international scientific community. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the Copley Medal, the Royal Medal, the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, the Canada Gairdner International Award, the Grand Prix Charles-Leopold Mayer, the Sir Hans Krebs Medal, the Mendel Medal, the Croonian Medal and Lecture, the Albert Medal, the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, and the Order of Merit. He was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, received EMBO Membership, and was named a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
In the later decades of his life, Crick extended his scientific work into neuroscience, a field distinct from the molecular biology with which he had made his name. He died on 28 July 2004 in La Jolla, San Diego. His authored work Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature stands as a concrete record of his engagement with questions about the fundamental nature and origins of living systems.
Quotes by Francis Crick
Francis Crick's insights on:
It is one of the more striking generalizations of biochemistry – which surprisingly is hardly ever mentioned in the biochemical textbooks – that the twenty amino acids and the four bases, are, with minor reservations, the same throughout Nature.
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. They have invested so much effort in one particular field that it is often extremely difficult, at that time in their careers, to make a radical change. I, on the other hand, knew nothing, except for a basic training in somewhat old-fashioned physics and mathematics and an ability to turn my hand to new things. I.
It is amateurs who have one big bright beautiful idea that they can never abandon. Professionals know that they have to produce theory after theory before they are likely to hit the jackpot.
Human beings... are far too prone to generalize from one instance. The technical word for this, interestingly enough, is superstition.
A person’s mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them.
All approaches at a higher level are suspect until confirmed at the molecular level.
I had discovered the gossip test – what you are really interested in is what you gossip about.
What could be more foolish than to base one’s entire view of life on ideas that, however plausible at the time, now appear to be quite erroneous? And what would be more important than to find our true place in the universe by removing one by one these unfortunate vestiges of earlier beliefs?