Francis Crick
Molecular biologist, Nobel Prize in Medicine 1962 for the structure of DNA
Born 1916 · Died 2004
Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author · CC BY 4.0
«We have discovered the secret of life.»
Francis Crick and James Watson determined the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, explaining in a single model how genetic information is stored and copied. He spent his later career working on consciousness.
Key achievements
- Co-discovered the double helix structure of DNA, 1953
- Nobel Prize in Medicine, 1962
- Later reframed consciousness as a problem for neuroscience
Universities
London, Bloomsbury
Took a bachelor's degree in physics in 1937 and began a PhD on the viscosity of water, interrupted by the war.
Cambridge, England
Took his PhD in 1954 at the Cavendish Laboratory, where he and James Watson worked out the double helix.
Facts
- He described his abandoned PhD topic, measuring the viscosity of water at high temperature, as the dullest problem imaginable.
- He walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridge on 28 February 1953 and announced that they had found the secret of life.
- He was thirty-five when he made the discovery and had not yet completed a doctorate.
Photographs
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