Francis Crick dies

Ukrainian Biochemical Journal, 2020

In the 20th century, DNA became a magnet, attracting representatives of various sciences. Prominent researchers competed among themselves to discover the structure of DNA and to explain the mechanisms that determine our "natural fate", i.e., our heredity. an american chemist, biochemist, chemical engineer linus Pauling, a British physicist and molecular biologist maurice Wilkins, a British chemist, biophysicist, and X-ray crystallographer rosalind Franklin, an american geneticist, molecular biologist, zoologist James Watson, a British molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist Francis Crick were among them. They searched for the scientific explanation for the enigma of life hidden in DNA. An accurate description of DNA double-helical structure belongs to James Watson and Francis Crick. However, the missing pieces of the puzzle were elaborated by Rosalind Franklin, who was not given enough credit for her dedicated scientific work. Unlike her, Francis Crick, James Watson, and maurice Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1962 for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material. Whatever the DNA story is, it shows that all great scientific discoveries are not made from scratch. The immense number of people have contributed to the development of science and literally every researcher stands on the shoulders of giants, while the idea itself is in the air. The discovery of the structure of DNA became a cornerstone for the new scientific paradigm-biology acquired a molecular and biochemical basis. K e y w o r d s: DNa, DNa double helix, James Watson, Francis Crick, rosalind Franklin, maurice Wilkins, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or medicine 1962.

European Journal of Pain, 2018

Cellular and Molecular Biology, 2004

Journal of Biosciences, 2004

"I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood". This was the way Jim Watson began his controversial book The Double Helix. No wonder Crick felt taken aback by such seeming lack of solidarity towards an old friend and colleague -after all, they had together conquered the Everest of biology, opened up a new field of inquiry about the structure and function of the gene, and touched on the very nature of life. And this was just one example of Watson's snap judgments and indiscretions; there were more in a widely circulated early manuscript of the book, entitled "Honest Jim". In fact, few people in the manuscript or subsequent book escaped Watson's "over-honest" commentary -least of all himself. But it was the overall way in which Watson presented the story of the race for the double helix that galled Francis Crick and also Maurice Wilkins, Watson's co-laureates for the Nobel Prize in 1962 (Watson and Crick shared a half, Wilkins got the other half for his X-ray crystallographic work). Crick and Wilkins regarded this as Watson's highly personal version of the truth, and a book that could do potential damage. Their pressure on Harvard University Press not to publish Honest Jim succeeded, but the book could not be suppressed. The result was a somewhat less gossipy version, The Double Helix, published by Atheneum Press in 1966. Crick's and Wilkins' reactions were not at all unusual at the time -in fact, book reviews of The Double Helix show that many were shocked at Watson's descriptions of how the work was done. The 1960s was an innocent time when it came to the public image of science. (Later, Crick and Wilkins reconsidered and reconciled with Watson, allowing him this "personal view".) In his book, Watson often does make it sound as if Crick and he were just lucky, stumbling on the truth while using other people's knowledge. Crick in his own memoirs notes that Jim Watson and he certainly could have used "the logical approach" had it proved necessary, and briefly outlines how they would have gone about this. What might Watson have had in mind with his statement about Crick? Crick certainly had a very tangible presence. As a youngish man in his mid-thirties at the time when Watson met him, Crick was known for his loud laughter -so loud, that the director of the Cavendish Laboratory, Sir Lawrence Bragg, often hastened away when he heard it. The pictures one sees of Crick makes it easy to imagine him actually laughing most of the time. He loved to dream up theories and experiments and to criticize others. But his laughter was not malicious; it was a sort of general laughter of enjoyment, the excitement of exploring new avenues, of overcoming new challenges, of pushing the unknown -in short, the laughter of a happy scientist. Crick was enjoying himself tremendously dreaming up explanations, often for other people's work. He walked into colleagues' labs telling them what kinds of experiments to do and what theories of his those would support. He talked endlessly. Meanwhile, he had no obvious authority to stand on, not having his Ph.D. Bragg wanted him to stop distracting himself, get on with his own thesis work and get out! Crick was in some sense more of a "pure" type of scientist than many others, because he had in fact given up an offer of a permanent career with the Admiralty after the war. Crick was originally a physicist but like many of his colleagues got disillusioned with the direction of post-war physics and moved into the field of biology instead. For Crick as for many of his colleagues, their fellow physicist Erwin Schrödinger's What Is Life had been a clear inspiring factor. One of the things that especially resonated with Crick was Schrödinger's discussion of codes. He was fascinated by the way in which a limited number of elements could give rise to a great number of combinations (the example given was the Morse code). This was to come in useful later. Crick had that kind of mathematical brain that likes calculation and puzzle-solving. That served him well in his own Ph.D. research on proteins, because he had to determine three-dimensional structure based on delicate calculations of intermolecular distances using X-ray crystallographic methods. But

The essay is an empirical case study of famed British scientist Francis Crick. Viewing him as a ‘cross-worlds influencer’ who was moreover dedicated to a cause, I have tried to understand how these two characteristics influenced the trajectory of his long career and how they shaped his contributions to the diverse research fields in which he was active, and concluded that these characteristics reconfigure Crick’s career into a coherent whole. First, I identify a major thread running through Crick’s career: helping organise ‘un-disciplined’ new research fields, and show that his successive choices were not serendipitous but motivated by what he construed as a crusade against ‘vitalism’: anti-vitalism was a defining driver of his career. I then examine how Crick put his skills as a cross-worlds influencer to the service of his cause, by helping organise his chosen fields of intervention. I argue that his activities as a cross-worlds influencer were an integral part of his way of ‘doin...

Journal of the History of the Neurosciences: Basic and Clinical Perspectives, 2014

"[Finkelstein] shows convincingly why writing a biography of du Bois-Reymond is a worthwhile undertaking, not only by exploring the potentials of the biography genre but also due to the immense richness of his choice of subject: Few scientists had such extensive academic connections (mentors, colleagues, and students), held such a range of influential academic offices, led such a full and exemplarily bourgeois private life, lived in so many different European countries and commented so publicly on such a range of different issues, including science, politics, literature and art, and philosophy. Du Bois-Reymond had it all, and, for this reason, his life offers an unparalleled window into the cultural, scientific, and political life of nineteenth-century Europe."

Tribute to Crick on Birth Centenary

Frontiers in Neuroanatomy, 2020

Neuroscience is the scientific research movement emerging in the United States around Francis Otto Schmitt (1903-1995) at the MIT in the 1960s. It was thought as an unifying framework first centred on molecular biology, and extending its scope progressively to virtually all novel aspects of the study of the nervous system including cognition, behaviour and therefore neurology, psychology and psychiatry. The Neuroscience Research Program of Schmitt was in fact an epistemological project of interdisciplinarity in the brain sciences rooted in the basic science researches and clinical investigations of the early XXth century, mainly developing in the XXth century around the major breakthroughs in neurophysiology and in cellular neuroscience between the 1930s and the 1990s rewarded by numerous Nobel Prizes in this domain. Recently, molecular and cellular neuroscience also focus on establishing contacts between animal studies and investigations in man with the revolutionary neuroimaging techniques. From a broader perspective, the association of medical procedures and disciplines in the study of the brain can be traced back to Antiquity with famous experiments such as the observation of an epileptic goat in the Hippocratic Corpus or the observation of the effects of cerebellar lesions in the dog by Pourfour du Petit in XVIIIth century, France. Historical enquiries help understand how different experimental approaches and clinical investigations were combined in the study of the nervous system at each time period, and this is what the history of neuroscience means.

2004

The Philosophical Review, 1984

1953 AND ALL THAT. A TALE OF TWO SCIENCES* Philip Kitcher "Must we geneticists become bacteriologists, physiological chemists and physicists, simultaneously with being zoologists and botanists? Let us hope so."-H. J. Muller, 1922' 1. THE PROBLEM T oward the end of their paper announcing the molecular structure of DNA, James Watson and Francis Crick remark, somewhat laconically, that their proposed structure might illuminate some central questions of genetics.2 Thirty years have passed since Watson and Crick published their famous discovery. Molecular biology has indeed transformed our understanding of heredity. The recognition of the structure of DNA, the understanding of gene replication, transcription and translation, the cracking of the genetic code, the study of gene regulation, these and other breakthroughs have combined to answer many of the questions that *Earlier versions of this paper were read at Johns Hopkins University and at the University of Minnesota, and I am very grateful to a number of people for comments and suggestions. In particular, I would like to thank