Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code

If anything typified Francis Crick's work style, it was his quest for cooperation. The "Watson-Crick" team has so dominated the literature of DNA research, that a view of Crick as an individual is a rare sight. Matt Ridley has admirably filled in that lack with this view of the Nobel Laureate's life. In a brief, but insightful, and superbly written account, the biographer has filled in many details of a scientist, a theoriser and, most significantly, a man of unquenchable curiosity. If any one term can typify Crick's personality, it was his outgoing nature. One of the more famous sentences in science writing is Jim Watson's announcement that he'd never seen Crick in "a modest mood". Although the remark irritated Crick, it did summarise many aspects of his nature in both work and personal relationships. Crick was immensely curious about nearly everything, and once he'd tackled a problem stayed doggingly with it. He was dismissive of "fuzzy logic", demanding much from his associates and co-workers - and demanding it constantly. As Ridley frequently points out, while this may have irritated many, the results were rewarding. Ridley subtitles the book "The Discoverer of the Genetic Code" due to Crick's persistance, even "bootlegging" time to accomplish the joint find through a model Crick built. Crick later went on to work on the "purpose" of DNA and its relation to protein production, something fundamental to life. Ridley traces Crick's early life and his career during WWII. He was a late arrival in academia, standing out among his fellows both in physical stature and age. He enjoyed the banter with professors and fellow students, although his braying laugh left some disaffected. The proper people perceived the strength of his mind, however, and encouraged his pursuits, although sometimes on a short leash. Some of that outgoing nature likely brought about his first marriage, and just as likely was the cause of its later dissolution. It certainly led to his second wife, Odile, but this time cemented the match for decades. Crick's noteriety derived from the DNA discovery brought numerous offers for positions, but it was the British Internal Revenue policies that led him to the United States. There, he launched many new investigations. Among these was life's origins, a topic that had long fascinated him. Crick had difficulty with the notion that life simply emerged from chemical reactions. He suggested that life on Earth had been "seeded" in bacterial form by distant alien civilisations intent on preserving their genetic formulas. A later collaboration with Christof Koch resulted in "The Astonishing Hypothesis", a work on human consciousness. Ridley spends a chapter on "the book"; James Watson's highly personalised account of the DNA discovery. It was an irritant to Crick, not only because he was dealt with frankly by "Honest Jim" [which was the book's original title!], but because while Crick may have been informal in his lif

This is a wonderful biography, full of telling details and written by an author who knew Crick personally. Provides the best account to date of the sequence of events and thinking that led to fundamental understanding of molecular genetics.

I bought this book mainly to find out how the discovery of the workings of DNA was carried out. But it is also a biography of Crick and Ridley portrays Crick the person well, so much so that I was very sad when I got to the part about Crick's death. Watson had previously told the story of the discovery of the DNA structure in his book The Double Helix, but in his version, he tried to present the events as he saw them when he was living through them. Ridley gives a more objective picture and he also has a lot of information that Watson had to omit because he didn't know it at the time. Ridley's is far better as science history; Watson's is a helluva lot better story. Watson and Crick approached the question of DNA structure with different motives. As Watson tells it - and his story rings true in this regard - he was a young, unknown scientist looking for a project that would establish him as more than just a bright post-doc. Crick, a militant atheist, wanted to show that there was some important aspect of life that could be explained without resorting to the hypothesis of God. (Numerous people had already done this; Crick wanted to extend the work in some significant way.) DNA was perfect for both men. Significantly, it was Crick who insisted on including a line in the original letter to Nature saying that the structure suggested a method for replication. With the double helix nailed down, Watson could say "Mission Accomplished" and devote some energy to his next major project: looking for a wife. (That's how he tells it in the sequel.) For Crick however, the job had barely begun. To make his point, he had to show how DNA did its job, using only the laws of chemistry. He dedicated much of the rest of his life to this task and, as Ridley tells it, he was a major inspiration to others in the field. Most of the things that were discovered in this period were familiar to me, as they are to most people who are interested in modern biology. But the story of how the facts were worked out had some surprises. For example, it seemed obvious to me, looking backward, that the code should be a sequence of triplets with no overlap. But Crick tried other, cleverer, schemes before he settled on this one. I need to be reminded from time to time that discovery can be quirky. Later in his life, Crick tackled the problem of trying to explain consciousness. As Ridley tells it, Crick met a lot of resistance to his idea that scientists should try to find connections between experiences and brain activities. This doesn't ring true to me since I know that scientists in the 1950s were already mapping particular brain locations to particular memories and actions. I suspect that some people were resistant to the idea and that others were way ahead of Crick. While I'm sure that Crick's work has never changed a single mind about the existence of God, it is certainly important for our understanding of hereditary diseases, cancer, evolution, and other

It has been many years since I learned the basics of DNA, RNA, and protein synthesis. This book was a wonderful, short review of the material. I particularly enjoyed reading about the early educational history of Crick. If you have any interest in modern molecular biology, I believe you will enjoy reading this brief biography of the man present at the conception.

Matt Ridley has captured much of Francis Crick's essence in a very short, credible, engaging book. He has captured Crick's contributions to the discovery of DNA, but he also resurrects Crick's equally great contributions to understanding DNA's coding scheme. He has, I believe, portrayed the essence of Crick's thinking style - Crick's superb ability to visualize details in three-dimensional space; his life-long need to talk and debate with close colleagues; his intellectual pragmatism, his diligent reading abilities, his playfulness, and his ability to focus for long periods. Ridley has captured Crick's many moments of being polite, spirited, friendly, accommodating, and curious. But Ridley has also captured the stronger aspects of Crick's personality. These include his ability to take strong stands against things he despised, such as vitalism, royalty, and` organized religion. At times, these strong stands could be courageous and insightful. At others, Crick's behaviors could seem downright stubborn, cold and mean. A vitriolic attack on the Richard Gregory comes to mind, and is described in the later pages of the book. Another remarkable aspect of the book is its treatment of the mundane and perhaps "mediocre" Crick. The portrait of Crick and his work in WWII is fascinating for this reason, and invites considerable speculation. Ridley weighs in on the well-known, controversial, mysterious and misunderstood aspects of the discovery of DNA. He includes sane descriptions and analyses of Crick's storied colleagues -Watson, Wilkins, Franklin, Brenner, Orgel, and many others. Ridley's treatment of Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins, Pauling, Chargaff and others involved in the controversial steps toward the discovery of DNA is well worth a look. "The story of the double helix is awash with might-have beens. Every participant had cause for regret about a blunder made or an opportunity missed." We see that Rosalind Franklin's interactions with Crick and others were mysterious and complex. Despite any hard feelings, we see Crick and his wife befriend Franklin toward the end of her life. But we also see Crick respond to controversy by harshly describing Franklin as "not sound." We see Wilkins as a somewhat unfortunate figure, despite his Nobel Prize. He is remembered, in part, as the man who did not collaborate sanely with Franklin; who failed to build models in a timely manner; who stole Franklin's data. As I write this review, the book has been on the market for about a week, and Matt Ridley has just presented talks on his book at UCSD and at the Salk Institute. These talks, moderated by Roger Bingham and Stuart Anstis, were taped and will be published in some form soon. If you have a strong interest in Crick and his story, then it will be well worth watching these talks and the discussions that followed. They were riveting. The rooms were filled with many people who knew Crick well, and their questions and comments made for