Before DNA, Francis Crick designed naval mines and measured boring water
The man who helped crack DNA's double helix spent World War II designing magnetic and acoustic mines for the Admiralty. His abandoned doctoral project, on the viscosity of hot water, he called the dullest problem imaginable. He switched to biology at 31 and was still editing a paper on his deathbed.
Crick grew up in Weston Favell near Northampton after his birth on 8 June 1916; his family ran a boot and shoe factory. His grandfather, an amateur naturalist, corresponded with Charles Darwin, and an uncle taught young Francis glassblowing, chemistry and photographic printing in a garden shed. Around the age of 12 he stopped going to church, preferring scientific answers to religious belief. He took a science degree at University College London, graduating in 1937.
War derailed his PhD. At the Admiralty Research Laboratory he worked on mine design alongside many future leading scientists. In 1947 he joined a wave of physical scientists moving into biology, a shift helped by the prestige physicists had won with wartime inventions such as radar. After about two years studying cytoplasm at the Strangeways Research Laboratory in Cambridge, he moved to the Cavendish Laboratory to work with Max Perutz and John Kendrew.
There he and James Watson published their 1953 Nature paper on the structure of DNA, work that also depended on Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. Crick, Watson and Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries about nucleic acid structure and its role in transmitting biological information. Crick also popularised the phrase central dogma: once information passes from nucleic acids into protein, it cannot flow back.
He spent his later career at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, turning to theoretical neuroscience and the scientific study of consciousness. His colleague Christof Koch recalled him working on a manuscript to the end. Crick died of colon cancer on 28 July 2004, and his ashes were scattered over the Pacific. In 2013 his Nobel medal sold at auction for $2,270,000, with a fifth of the price donated to the Francis Crick Institute in London.
Source: Francis Crick
