Francis Crick

Francis Harry Compton Crick (1916–2004) was an English scientist who worked across molecular biology, biophysics, and neuroscience. Alongside James Watson, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins, he was instrumental in figuring out the helical shape of DNA. In 1953, Crick and Watson published a paper in *Nature* that established the foundation for understanding how DNA is structured and how it works. For this work, Crick, Watson, and Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, recognized for their discoveries about the molecular structure of nucleic acids and how information flows in living things.

Crick was a key theoretical molecular biologist and made essential contributions to revealing DNA’s helical structure. He is famous for coining the phrase “central dogma,” which describes the idea that once genetic information moves from nucleic acids (DNA or RNA) to proteins, it cannot travel back to nucleic acids—meaning the final step in that information flow is one-way and irreversible.

Later in his career, Crick became the J.W. Kieckhefer Distinguished Research Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. There, his work shifted to theoretical neurobiology and trying to bring scientific rigor to the study of human consciousness. He stayed at the Salk Institute until his death in 2004. According to Christof Koch, Crick was editing a manuscript on his deathbed—a scientist to the very end.

Crick was born on 8 June 1916 in Weston Favell, a small village near Northampton, England. He was the first son of Harry Crick and Annie Elizabeth Crick (née Wilkins). His father and uncle ran the family’s boot and shoe factory. His grandfather, Walter Drawbridge Crick, was an amateur naturalist who wrote about local foraminifera, corresponded with Charles Darwin, and had two species of gastropods named after him.

As a child, Francis was drawn to science through books. His parents took him to church, but by around age 12, he decided he no longer wanted to go, preferring scientific inquiry over religious belief. His uncle Walter lived nearby and taught him glassblowing, chemistry experiments, and photography in a shed at the bottom of his garden. Around age eight or nine, Crick started at the junior form of Northampton Grammar School, which was close enough to walk but he usually took the bus or rode his bike. The higher-level teaching there was decent but not inspiring. After turning 14, he attended Mill Hill School in London on a scholarship, studying math, physics, and chemistry with his best friend John Shilston. On Foundation Day in July 1933, he shared the Walter Knox Prize for Chemistry, and he later credited the quality of teaching at Mill Hill for his success.

Crick studied at University College London (UCL), earning a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of London in 1937. He started a PhD at UCL, but World War II interrupted it. He later became a PhD student and Honorary Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, working mainly at the Cavendish Laboratory and the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology. He was also an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and of UCL.

His PhD project—measuring water viscosity at high temperatures—he later called “the dullest problem imaginable.” He worked under physicist Edward Neville da Costa Andrade at UCL, but the war intervened; during the Battle of Britain, a bomb crashed through the lab roof and destroyed his equipment, steering him away from a physics career. Still, in his second year as a PhD student, he won the Carey Foster Research Prize, a major honor. He later did postdoctoral work at the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute (now part of NYU Tandon).

During World War II, Crick worked at the Admiralty Research Laboratory alongside notable scientists like David Bates, Robert Boyd, and Nevill Mott. He designed magnetic and acoustic mines and helped create a new mine effective against German minesweepers.

In 1947, at age 31, Crick began studying biology, joining a wave of physical scientists moving into biological research—a shift made possible by physicists like Sir John Randall, whose wartime inventions (like radar) had raised their influence. Crick had to adapt from the “elegance and deep simplicity” of physics to the “elaborate chemical mechanisms that natural selection had evolved over billions of years.” He described this as “almost as if one had to be born again.” Physics had taught him hubris and the conviction that since physics was already successful, great advances should be possible in other sciences like biology. This attitude, he felt, made him bolder than typical biologists, who were often daunted by biology’s complexity rather than inspired by physics’ past triumphs.