Francis Crick A non psychopathological genius

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

Genome Biology, 2004

Francis Crick, known for his discovery with James Watson of the double helix but described by a biologist colleague as "the absolute master in a way that nobody else in that generation was," died in San Diego, California. He was 88. "If all you think of with Francis Crick is the double helix, then you don't know the man," Crick's Cambridge contemporary and Nobel prize winner Aaron Klug told us. Although Crick did perform many of the intellectual somersaults that revealed DNA's double helix-work for which he shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine-that was only one of the world-changing discoveries that littered his career, according to Klug. While many of his achievements are now so established that they are the stuff of the school curriculum, in their time each was the pinnacle of scientific achievement. Born on June 8, 1916 in Northampton, UK, Francis Harry Compton Crick in 1937 got a degree in physics at University College London, before spending World War II devising ways of sweeping German magnetic mines for the British Admiralty, and designing circuits for British magnetic and acoustic mines. During the war he also married Ruth Dodd, and the couple had a son, Michael. Around the time that the war ended, so too did his marriage. In 1947 he married Odile Speed, and the couple had two daughters, Gabrielle and Jacqueline. 1947 also marked a significant change in his working life, as Crick moved to Strangeways Laboratory, Cambridge, where he studied the physical properties of cytoplasm in cultured fibroblast cells, a task he found intellectually limiting. "He always knew who to go and talk to about problems," recalled Cambridge physiologist Horace Barlow. "He sought me out because he knew that I was interested in neuroscience. He was already working on a problem in cell biology, but he didn't think it was very important-all he wanted to do was get that finished with. He wondered whether to go into neurosciences."

Tribute to Crick on Birth Centenary

Medical Hypotheses, 2016

Recent studies based on biography analysis provide support for the notion that the prevalence of mental illness in the creative geniuses of art, literature and science is higher than it is in more ordinary folk. However, this relationship between madness and genius, which was also addressed by the classical philosophers, has been generalized to all branches of professional endeavour. Whilst it may hold true for illustrious personalities of the fine arts, we found that the relationship proves inappropriate to the biographies of ten individuals renowned in history for their innovative contributions to medical science. Furthermore, examination of these ten biographies invites the hypothesis that certain personality traits -especially, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to new experience-can act to enhance creativity and protect against mental illness.

Cellular and Molecular Biology, 2004

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...

History of Psychiatry, 2010

In October 1964, Julian Huxley, Ernst Mayr, Humphrey Osmond and Abram Hoffer co-published a controversial paper in Nature, in which they tried to explain the persistence of schizophrenia from an evolutionary perspective. This article will elucidate how the reputed authors composed this paper to make it a strong argument for biological psychiatry. Through a close reading of their correspondence, it will furthermore clarify the elements which remained unspoken in the paper, but which were elementary in its genesis. The first was the dominance of psychoanalytical theory in (American) psychiatry -a dominance which the authors wanted to break. The second was the ongoing discussion on the boundaries of biological determinism and the desirability of a new kind of eugenics. As such, the Huxley et al. paper can be used to study the central issues of psychiatry in a pivotal era of its history.

Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 2008

George Engel's biopsychosocial model was associated with the critique of biomedical dogmatism and acknowledged the historical precedence of the work of Adolf Meyer. However, the importance of Meyer's psychobiology is not always recognized. One of the reasons may be because of his tendency to compromise with biomedical attitudes. This paper restates the Meyerian perspective, explicitly acknowledging the split between biomedical and biopsychological approaches in the origin of modern psychiatry. Our present-day understanding of this conflict is confounded by reactions to 'anti-psychiatry.' Neo-Meyerian principles can only be reestablished by a challenge to biomedicine that accepts, as did Meyer, the inherent uncertainty of medicine and psychiatry.

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 2019

European journal of analytic philosophy

Many spectacular claims about psychopaths are circulated. This contribution aims at providing the reader with the more complex reality of the phenomenon (or phenomena), and to point to issues of particular interest to philosophers working in moral psychology and moral theory. I first discuss the current evidence regarding psychopaths’ deficient empathy and decision-making skills. I then explore what difference it makes to our thinking whether we regard their deficit dimensionally (as involving abilities that are on or off) and whether we focus on primary or secondary psychopathy. My conclusion is that most grand claims about psychopathy settling long-standing debates in moral philosophy and psychology are overblown, but there is much to be learnt from this disorder when it comes to formulating modern theories of moral psychology.