“A thoroughly researched account of the history and relationships that shaped the scientist who co-discovered the structure of DNA.
Crick: A Mind in Motion — from DNA to the Brain Matthew Cobb Profile Books (2025)
Francis Crick has gone down in history as half of a double act with James Watson — a duo perhaps almost as iconic as the double-helix structure of DNA that they proposed. The pair were immortalized in Watson’s sensational 1968 book, The Double Helix, with Crick painted as garrulous and cerebral and Watson as gauche but driven. Watson had initially described his first draft as a novel, yet other published accounts of the discovery and the personalities involved have stuck closely to the script ever since.
In a magisterial new biography, Crick, zoologist and historian Matthew Cobb revisits the double-helix breakthrough, a discovery he discussed in forensic detail in his book Life’s Greatest Secret (2015). Yet, this time, the publication of the structure and the immediate aftermath of the discovery occupy just 41 pages. Instead, Cobb explores how Crick’s thinking, writing and interactions with others transcended that brilliant, yet contested, episode, revolutionizing molecular biology and influencing evolutionary and developmental biology, visual neuroscience and ideas about consciousness.
At the same time, he makes a more sustained attempt than either of Crick’s previous biographers (Matt Ridley and Robert Olby) to answer several questions. Who was Crick? What kind of person was he? What did he care about?
Crick was notoriously reluctant to divulge personal information or even have his photograph taken. Combing through a remarkably comprehensive set of personal and professional archives with meticulous attention to detail, Cobb has reconstructed Crick’s relationships with those who were essential crew mates on his intellectual odyssey.
Crick was born in 1916 in Northampton, a market town in the English Midlands, and grew up in a comfortable but not notably intellectual home. From an early age he had a burning desire to know why things were the way they were, a curiosity he satisfied by burying himself in the family copies of Arthur Mee’s eight-volume The Children’s Encyclopedia (1910). He did well enough at school to go to University College London to study physics, where he later began a PhD on the viscosity of water — “the dullest problem imaginable”, as Crick later said.
As Cobb explains, Crick’s future was transformed by his experiences during the Second World War. His PhD studies were interrupted when he was called up to serve in the British Admiralty, conducting research into naval mines — real-time problem-solving that suited his restless nature. In the Mine Design Department cafeteria he met Georg Kreisel, an Austrian refugee philosopher who had just graduated from the University of Cambridge, UK. Kreisel’s conversation and voluminous correspondence challenged Crick to sharpen his thinking and delighted him with their obscenities. Cobb makes the salacious letters part of the lifelong soundtrack to Crick’s intellectual endeavours.
Also working at the Admiralty was the “vivacious, talented and tolerant” artist Odile Speed. She became Crick’s second wife in 1949; their partnership was one of mutual devotion that allowed for his numerous affairs. Odile helped to develop his interest in art and literature, ran their households, hosted exuberant parties and raised their children. In short, she provided an environment in which Crick had the luxury of devoting all of his energy to his intellectual life.
Deciphering DNA’s code
In the late 1940s, disillusioned with physics and inspired by physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s 1944 book What is Life?, Crick decided that the nature of life was the only question worth pursuing, other than the neural basis of consciousness. He began a new PhD project in structural biology at the Medical Research Council’s Unit for Research on the Molecular Structure of Biological Systems — later known as the Laboratory of Molecular Biology — in Cambridge, UK, where he worked for almost 30 years. Under the genial chairmanship of molecular biologist Max Perutz, Crick never had to teach or grapple with university administration: he applied for a grant only once in his life. He had the grace to admit that luck had played a part in his success, but to some extent he made his own luck.
Cobb presents the double-helix story as much more of a collaboration with chemist Rosalind Franklin and biophysicist Maurice Wilkins at King’s College London than Crick and Watson acknowledged in their iconic 1953 paper (J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick Nature 171, 737–738; 1953). He exonerates Crick and Watson of theft, but not of bad manners. “They should have requested permission to use the data,” Cobb writes. “They did not.”
The double-helix structure provided a springboard to understanding how information is transferred between DNA and the proteins it encodes. In Crick’s PhD thesis, he had called this the ‘central problem’ of biology. He tackled the issue with geneticist Sydney Brenner. Between them, they conceived the existence of messenger RNA, showed that the sequence of bases in mRNA acts as a code that dictates each protein’s amino-acid sequence and found that three bases encoded each amino acid (F. H. C. Crick et al. Nature 192, 1227–1232; 1961).
These landmark findings involved numerous experiments overseen by Brenner’s highly skilled research assistant, Leslie Barnett; Crick himself was notoriously clumsy in the laboratory. Cobb acknowledges her “vital” role but we learn nothing about her as a person. Various long-suffering secretaries also appear fleetingly: they formed part of Crick’s essential support system, some became close friends, and it would have been good to hear more of their voices (and perhaps less of Kreisel’s). As for the lovers, they drift by like ghosts: noted, occasionally quoted, but not identified. “Not our business”, says Cobb.
The cracking of the mRNA code itself fell to others, although Crick retained a ringmaster role. Particularly after sharing the 1962 Nobel prize with Watson and Wilkins, he mostly stayed out of the lab, instead reading, talking, thinking, writing and travelling incessantly to give talks and hold discussions. In 1962, he became a generously paid non-resident fellow of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California. He embraced the personal and academic freedom of his Californian existence, enthusiastically experimenting with mind-altering substances under the influence of the poet Michael McClure.
A question of consciousness
Crick took a while to find a fresh scientific direction and Cobb hints at just how far off the rails he went. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Crick worked manically on poorly evidenced theories about three wildly different topics — pattern formation in embryonic development, chromosome organization and the origin of life. Out of character for such an avowed rationalist, he developed an idea of astronomer Carl Sagan’s that life had been seeded on Earth by aliens. Soon afterwards, he had a breakdown that forced him to scale back his relentless touring.
Although politically disengaged — his more left-wing friends saw him as a conservative — he fell into the trap of thinking that his Nobel laurels qualified him to hold forth on matters of social concern. Rejecting religious belief as a source of moral authority, in a 1968 talk he raised the idea of eugenic policies that had not been widely discussed since the 1930s. In his personal correspondence, he argued that rich people should be encouraged to have more children and denied any racist motive by stating that “if I have a prejudice it is against the poor”.
After push back from scientists he admired, by the early 1970s, he had accepted that he was unqualified to counsel on such subjects. Cobb characterizes Crick’s social attitudes as Edwardian, swallowed wholesale from the colonial-era Children’s Encyclopedia — despite his enthusiasm for wild parties, drugs and sex.
Crick moved permanently to California in 1977 and for the rest of his life focused mainly on tackling the second of the two problems that he had identified at the outset of his career: the basis of human consciousness. Homing in on the question of how humans experience the visual world, he once again became a brilliant influencer and synthesizer of ideas from both neuroscience and machine learning. His 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis argued that all conscious experience stems from brain activity and nothing else; however, it fell short of explaining how. Although this theory was not particularly astonishing to most neuroscientists, it made an enormous public impact.
Of Crick’s three biographers, Cobb comes closest to making the case that Crick belongs in the scientific pantheon alongside Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, arguing that “Crick’s thinking changed how the rest of us see the world”. Ridley’s book (Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code, 2006) is an entertaining primer but brief, unreferenced and unindexed. In his authorized biography Francis Crick: Hunter of Life’s Secrets (2009), Olby is as thorough as Cobb but perhaps more reverent, glancing coyly at Crick’s preoccupations with drugs and sex, whereas Cobb makes them essential accessories to his intellectual pursuits.
Cobb is reliably excellent in maintaining the narrative momentum of a life in science that was anything but mundane. His gripping and accessible account is generous while calling out flaws as he sees them, and discreet when that could hurt the feelings of living friends and relatives. What made Crick Crick, he argues, was his lifelong attempt to “chase the intellectual high” produced by flashes of unique insight. Crick was not, he concludes, a saint or a hero but “an extraordinarily clever man with limits to his interests and perception”.” [1]
1. Nature 647, 29-31 (2025) By Georgina Ferry
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