The death of Francis Crick: the end of a golden age in biology

摘要

Born in 1916, Francis Harry Compton Crick studied physics at University College, London, where he devoted his first scientific efforts to studying the viscosity of water at high temperatures. During the war, he participated in the development of 'noncontact' magnetic and acoustic mines. Like many other young physicists, he switched to biology after the Second World War, bored by the now dull studies pursued in physics, and attracted by the new frontier of knowledge that was biology, a discipline where the concepts and techniques of physics were desperately needed, He spent two years at the Strangeways Laboratory in Cambridge studying the physical properties of cytoplasm, and joined the Medical Research Unit at Cavendish laboratory headed by Max Perutz to study protein structure by X-ray diffraction studies. The decision he made with Jim Watson to focus on the structure of DNA, and the huge impact this structure had on the development of molecular biology, are well known. Francis Crick received with Jim Watson and Maurice Wilkins the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for this discovery. To consider that determining the structure of DNA was the right way to understand the power of genes was a brilliant piece of foresight at a time when the results of Oswald Avery showing that genes were made of DNA were largely ignored.