Francis Crick
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/science/11book.html

July 11, 2006
Books
A Peek Into the Remarkable Mind Behind the Genetic Code
By NICHOLAS WADE

Francis Crick is associated with two discoveries, probably two of the most important in the 20th century: the double helix of DNA and the genetic code. The first he discovered with James Watson; the second he worked out mostly by himself, though with contributions from many others.

Despite Crick's extraordinary distinction as a scientist, little has been written about his life aside from his brief autobiographical essay, "What Mad Pursuit," and his leading role in "The Eighth Day of Creation," Horace Freeland Judson's outstanding oral history of molecular biology.

The first biography of Crick, who died in 2004 at the age of 88, has now appeared. Called "Francis Crick, Discoverer of the Genetic Code," it is by Matt Ridley, one of the few journalists Crick was in the habit of talking with. Mr. Ridley has created a vivid portrait that explains Crick's scientific work with clarity, deftly outlines his career and provides sharp insights into the nature of Crick's remarkable creativity.

Crick, who set a high value on his privacy, seems not to have left biographers a great deal to work with beyond what is already on the record.

One source of new material developed by Mr. Ridley concerns Crick's wartime career in the British Admiralty. Trained as a physicist, Crick worked on magnetic and acoustic mines and mine countermeasures. Intelligence agents learned that the German minesweepers known as Sperrbrechers carried an enormous magnet to make British magnetic mines explode harmlessly far ahead of them.

When a Royal Air Force plane photographed a Sperrbrecher with its wake cutting through the wash of a mine explosion, Crick realized he had the physical information to calculate the weight and strength of the magnet. On that basis he designed a mine so insensitive it would detonate only right under a Sperrbrecher.

He had considerable trouble persuading British admirals to invest in a mine that all other ships passed over unscathed. But that obstacle overcome, his devices worked splendidly, sinking more than 100 Sperrbrechers and stripping German waters of their defenses.

Rejecting a promising career in military physics after the war, Crick was influenced by two friends, the Austrian mathematician Georg Kreisel and the physicist Maurice Wilkins, to begin a new career in biological research.

As Mr. Ridley notes, Crick was in middle age when he embarked on his career of scientific discovery, in contrast with the many scientists who make their marks when young.

Crick forged his own path through life. Mr. Ridley dwells only briefly on Crick's heterodox views and experimental way of life. He seldom read newspapers, because working in intelligence had convinced him that most stories never reached the press. He experimented with marijuana and LSD, Mr. Ridley reports.

Crick and his wife Odile held lively parties and enjoyed the company of their many bohemian friends, like John Gayer-Anderson, who made pornographic pottery.

"Though they did not have an explicitly 'open marriage,' Francis was an incorrigible flirt," Mr. Ridley writes, "and Odile at least affected not to mind."

Crick refused to meet the queen when she visited Cambridge's new Laboratory of Molecular Biology because he disapproved of royalty, and he declined a knighthood. He deeply disliked religion, saying once that Christianity was all right between consenting adults but should not be taught to children.

He refused to attend weddings or funerals, though he was always up for the party afterward. He resigned from Churchill College when it decided to build a chapel like any other Cambridge college.

Desire to undercut religious obscurantism was a cogent motive in Crick's scientific career, shaping his choice first of the gene and later of consciousness as problems that, if cracked, would destroy the last refuges of vitalism.

"Throughout, he stayed true to himself: ebullient, loquacious, charming, skeptical, tenacious," Mr. Ridley writes in an eloquent coda. "He would have liked to find the seat of consciousness and to see the retreat of religion. He had to settle for explaining life."

Among the many virtues of this short, beautifully written book are the sharp glimpses it offers into a mind of remarkable creativity.

An unusual aspect of Crick's work habits was that his thinking was forged in the challenge of argument. This required a constant interlocutor or intellectual sparring partner. Mr. Kreisel, the mathematician, was the first holder of this unusual position, followed by Watson for the discovery of the double helix, Sydney Brenner for the work on the genetic code, and Christof Koch for the study of the brain and consciousness.

"In the periods when he had no such sounding board he was visibly at a loss," Mr. Ridley says.

Another feature of Crick's mind was that he excelled in being able to visualize the physical relationship of objects. He could intuitively imagine in his mind's eye the space-group symmetry of a crystal's unit cell, meaning how far it must be rotated to look the same again. A glance at Rosalind Franklin's X-ray photos of DNA told him what she had not grasped, that the two parallel chains of the DNA double helix must run in opposite directions.

"Although it is necessary to be able to handle the algebraic details, I soon found I could see the answer to many of these mathematical problems by a combination of imagery and logic, without first having to slog through the mathematics," he said.

Another special feature of his approach to science was the difficult balance he always maintained between theory and empiricism.

He tried every possible theoretical approach to the problem of how the 60 possibilities allowed by a four base triplet genetic code might yield 20 kinds of amino acid but never trusted the answers, however elegant. That essential caution left him open to the empirical approach by which the code was finally broken.

He had the gift of being able to scan vast amounts of confusing experimental data, reject parts that seemed not to fit and divine the correct answer. Before DNA, biochemists had stamp-collected a large number of amino acids. In 1953 Crick and Watson, in sessions at the Eagle pub in Cambridge, set out to select some finite number of amino acids that DNA might reasonably code for.

Ridley observes: "They came up with 20. That they got the list exactly right, despite being amateur biochemists, is a minor miracle."

Crick's special ability to combine his intuitions with theoretical and empirical judgment was at its finest in his astonishingly prescient paper of 1958 on protein synthesis.

In it he laid out the field's several fundamental axioms, including that all proteins are composed of combinations of the same 20 amino acids, and that the linear order of amino acids determines the three-dimensional structure into which the protein is shaped. "All these propositions were guesses," Mr. Ridley writes, "and all are correct."

Crick was slow to anger and quick to forgive. He was quite unreasonably furious at "The Double Helix," Watson's deep though gossipy account of their discovery.

The reason, Mr. Ridley suggests, is that Crick "saw himself as a dedicated seeker of great truths who had worked very hard, with long hours of reading, calculation, and intuition, to get to the point where he could make a great discovery; yet the world would now learn about the quest as if it had been just another soap opera."

But the two men were soon friends again, Crick later remarking, "I now appreciate how skillful Jim was."

It would be unfair to criticize the author for making essentially the same judgments about Crick's historical role as can be found in Mr. Judson's book, for both are correct. And it would be quite wrong to dismiss Mr. Ridley's biography because it does not contain much new information, although in truth it does not.
Mr. Ridley's contribution is that he has extracted from existing material a considerably more complete and colorful portrait of Crick than has existed before. And by deft narration and analysis, he has captured the wonder of an unparalleled scientific mind at work and at play.