Crick: The Molecule And the Man

“Crick

 

By Matthew Cobb

 

Basic, 608 pages, $36

 

In 1961 a new college of the University of Cambridge voted to approve the construction of an Anglican chapel. Churchill College, which admitted only men, had been modelled on MIT and was intended to contribute to Britain's scientific and technological improvement. As originally built it did not include a place of worship, but a large donation by a vicar and the agitation of some faithful fellows saw plans approved. At least one fellow, however, thought the addition represented a surrender to the forces of superstition and irrationality.

 

Francis Crick, a co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, was so enraged by the prospect of a religious space in his college that he wrote to Winston Churchill (after whom the establishment was named) to resign his position. As Matthew Cobb recounts in "Crick: A Mind in Motion," Churchill, who was by then 86, responded genially to point out that the chapel would "simply be an amenity for those who wished to use it." Mr. Crick replied that in that case the college should also contain a brothel as another such useful amenity and offered to help pay for it. "Why should I support the propagation of error?" Crick asked. Wisely, Churchill did not write back, but he did return the check, uncashed, with his compliments.

 

Born in the rural midlands of England in 1916, Crick originally studied physics at University College London, and worked on the electrical circuits of shipping mines during World War II. After deciding he would rather work on questions of the nature of life, he took up a research position at Cambridge. There, he met Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher, and went to all the lectures in biology and chemistry he could find. Eventually he was offered a post at the Cavendish laboratory -- the site of the discovery of the electron in 1897 and the first experimental splitting of the atom in 1932 -- to work on X-ray crystallography, by means of which the structure of proteins could be investigated.

 

The molecule that really interested Mr. Crick was DNA. Everyone suspected it was central to heredity but no one knew exactly how. In 1951 there arrived in Cambridge, as Mr. Cobb describes him, "a tall, thin, bug-eyed American called Jim Watson," who began collaborating with Crick on the problem. Two years later, in what Mr. Cobb calls "one of the most significant moments in the history of science," the two men announced they had figured out DNA's structure.

 

Was it really the work of only these two men? Rosalind Franklin had been making X-ray images of DNA in a London laboratory, one of which was passed on by a colleague to Crick and Watson and provided a crucial clue. The idea subsequently arose that Franklin had been unjustly written out of the story, but Mr. Cobb argues that this is something of a myth: Crick and Watson credited Franklin explicitly in their earliest papers, and she remained very friendly with Crick, sharing ideas and results in their correspondence. Alas, Franklin could not share in the men's 1962 Nobel Prize because she died from ovarian cancer in 1958.

 

Why, in any case, was this discovery so important?

 

As Mr. Cobb tells us, the explanation of the chemical structure of DNA made it possible, for the first time, to understand how it might replicate and direct the growth of life-forms. Crick and Watson had found the mechanism, long sought after, by which genetic information builds an organism. In subsequent years, Crick and others worked out the revolutionary implications of this idea, laying the basis for the entire field of modern genetics. One day, Crick thought, it might even be possible to transcribe the entire genetic code of a human being. This was completed in 2003 by the Human Genome Project.

 

Quickly becoming a world-famous scientist and lecturer, Crick flirted briefly with eugenics and concocted a theory ("outlandish," notes Mr. Cobb mildly) of "directed panspermia," according to which the seeds of life were deliberately sent to Earth by an alien civilization. But his real second act was in the nascent field of neuroscience. Mr. Cobb, a professor emeritus of zoology at the University of Manchester and the author of "The Idea of the Brain" (2020), an excellent cultural history of ideas about how our minds work, is especially persuasive on Crick's hitherto underacknowledged influence here. In a 1979 survey for Scientific American, Crick discussed new methods in neuroscience, including mapping areas of the brain and using computers to model neural networks of the kind that now power AI systems. "The ideas and insights he outlined still dominate the field," observes Mr. Cobb, "even though most neuroscientists have no idea that Crick was the first to coherently articulate them." Crick went on to make influential contributions to the study of neuroanatomy, dreams and visual perception.

 

Meanwhile, Crick was living a colorful personal life. He and his wife, Odile, smoked marijuana, listened to Jimi Hendrix and hosted glamorous and risque parties at their London house. She was also tolerant of his fondness for "pretty girls," with whom he could have "adventures." Unfashionably for a modern biographer, Mr. Cobb makes only very brief and glancing reference to these peccadilloes. This is perhaps fair reciprocation for the fact that, soon after a conference in which he suggested putting a chemical in food to render people sterile (then giving the antidote only to those considered to be worthy breeders), Crick decided to cease making public statements about political questions. "As you know," he wrote to one correspondent, "I've tried to take an interest in problems concerning science and society but I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that I have little talent for them and no taste at all." If only more famous scientists were as self-aware.

 

---

 

Mr. Poole is the author of "Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas."” [1]

 

1. The Molecule And the Man. Poole, Steven.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 05 Jan 2026: A13.