Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code by Matt Ridley

• Podcast - Matt Ridley talking to New Scientist (8 mins).
• BHA Darwin Day Lecture 2007 Monday February 12th, 2007 - Tickets available. Speakers: Richard Dawkins and Matt Ridley
  
• Review by New Scientist:-

FRANCIS CRICK did not fit the stereotype of a scientific genius. He was not eccentric, shy or even absent-minded. Rather, he was extrovert, loud (his braying laugh often annoyed), gregarious and fond of pretty girls. He was striking-looking, too: tall, with blue eyes.

Worse still for purveyors of cliché, some of his best thoughts came to him in pubs rather than labs, and were developed through endless conversations, especially with a series of close intellectual partners. Among them were Jim Watson (who described him as "the brightest person I have ever known"), Sydney Brenner, who shared a lab and visits to the Eagle pub with Crick for 20 years, and the young neuroscientist Christof Koch, with whom Crick worked for the last 18 years of his life. Special partner or not, the rules were always the same: "there was no shame in floating a stupid idea, but no umbrage was to be taken if the other person said it was stupid".

All this we learn from Matt Ridley's biography of Francis Crick, the first account of his life to appear since he died in 2004. It is an excellent, fast-paced tale of a long, astonishing life: Crick could serve as exemplar for late starters and for those who refuse to quit.

Born in 1916 in the English east Midlands, into a family of Northamptonshire shoe manufacturers whose business had gone to pot, he managed only a second-class degree in physics before the second world war arrived, and went off to work on anti-ship mines at the Admiralty. He finally gained a research studentship at Cambridge at the age of 31, and, at 35, as Jim Watson put it, "he was almost totally unknown... and most people thought he talked too much". Yet within a couple of years, in 1953, he and Watson had cracked DNA.

Ridley is right to say that elucidating DNA's structure was not Crick's greatest achievement. He showed his real genius over the following decades as the central theorist and driving force of the new science of molecular biology. Along the way there were wonderful eureka moments. Ridley tells the story of Crick, Brenner and others interrogating the leading bacterial geneticist François Jacob when: "Suddenly, Brenner let out a 'yelp'. He began talking fast. Crick began talking back just as fast. Everybody else in the room watched in amazement. Brenner had seen the answer and Crick had seen him see it." This was the moment they solved the problem of how the DNA code was turned into protein: messenger RNA was read at a ribosome like a tape in a tape reader.

Crick's ambitions were always immodest. In 1946, when he decided to re-enter science, he said that he must do something "heroic" and "explode a mystery". The only problem was deciding whether to crack "the secret of the brain or the secret of life" first.

It was not until he was in his early 60s that he began to switch from molecular biology to neurobiology, settling at one of the leading research centres, the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. At the late age of 80, Crick wrote with Koch the defining paper on the neural correlate of consciousness; eight years later, on the day he died, Crick was still working on a final, important paper.

So what was it like to work with Crick? Here Ridley's scientific biography cannot match Watson's intensely personal book, The Double Helix, with his up-close sketches of the unbearably quick-minded Crick refusing to hide from his colleagues that they "did not realise the real meaning of their latest experiments". My own recollection of conversation with Crick was his rejoinder to an idea of mine: "Let me explain why I think that is nonsense." This was neither arrogance nor rudeness; he was simply inviting you to join him in argument on his lifelong quest for truth.

“He was totally unknown... and he talked too much”

That last paper of Crick's was typical. He was examining the little-known brain structure called the claustrum, which he thought might be critical in tying together the components of consciousness. Experiments, he felt, were urgently needed. The paper ends: "What could be more important? So why wait?"

As Ridley recounts, on 28 July 2004 Crick was correcting the paper when he "became semi-coherent, imagining that Christof Koch was there and arguing with him". Later that day he died. With a little more time, perhaps he would have cracked his second secret too.

From issue 2576 of New Scientist magazine, 04 November 2006, page 53