His grandfather, an amateur naturalist by the name of Walter Drawbridge Crick ( 1857 – 1903 ), wrote a survey of local foraminifera ( single-celled protists with shells ), corresponded with Charles Darwin, and had two gastropods ( snails or slugs ) named after him.

Crick had failed to gain a place at a Cambridge college, probably through failing their requirement for Latin.

" According to Crick, the experience of learning physics had taught him something important — hubris — and the conviction that since physics was already a success, great advances should also be possible in other sciences such as biology.

( Randall had turned down Francis Crick from working at King's College.

Crick had the very optimistic view that life would very soon be created in a test tube.

When James Watson came to Cambridge, Crick was a 35-year-old graduate student ( due to his work during WWII ) and Watson was only 23, but he already had a Ph. D.

Crick was writing his Ph. D. thesis ; Watson also had other work such as trying to obtain crystals of myoglobin for X-ray diffraction experiments.

It is a matter of debate whether Watson and Crick should have had access to Franklin's results without her knowledge or permission, and before she had a chance to formally publish the results of her detailed analysis of her X-ray diffraction data which were included in the progress report.

However, Watson and Crick found fault in her steadfast assertion that, according to her data, a helical structure was not the only possible shape for DNA — so they had a dilemma.

One of the few references cited by Watson and Crick when they published their model of DNA was to a published article that included Sven Furberg's DNA model that had the bases on the inside.

Chargaff had also pointed out to Watson that, in the aqueous, saline environment of the cell, the predominant tautomers of the pyrimidine ( C and T ) bases would be the amine and keto configurations of cytosine and thymine, rather than the imino and enol forms that Crick and Watson had assumed.

After the discovery of the hydrogen bonded A: T and C: G pairs, Watson and Crick soon had their anti-parallel, double helical model of DNA, with the hydrogen bonds at the core of the helix providing a way to " unzip " the two complementary strands for easy replication: the last key requirement for a likely model of the genetic molecule.

Crick had started to think about interactions between the bases.

The Eagle in Cambridge is where Francis Crick interrupted patrons ' lunchtime on 28 February 1953 to announce that he and James Watson had " discovered the secret of life " after they had come up with their proposal for the structure of DNA.

It is debatable whether Watson and Crick should have been granted access to Franklin's results without her knowledge or permission, and before she had a chance to publish a detailed analysis of the content of her unpublished progress report.

The 1962 prize awarded to James D. Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins for their work on DNA structure and properties did not acknowledge the contributing work from others, such as Oswald Avery and Rosalind Franklin who had died by the time of the nomination.

Crick had agreed to become a fellow on the basis that no chapel be placed at Churchill.

In 2002, Michael Crick on the TV programme Newsnight caused some embarrassment when probing Duncan Smith's curriculum vitae, which had been in circulation for years, for example, being reproduced in the authoritative annual Dod's Parliamentary Companion for the previous ten years.

Michael Crick revealed that he had compiled embarrassing evidence, this time of dubious salary claims Duncan Smith made on behalf of his wife that were paid out of the public purse from September 2001 to December 2002.

Nitschke had encouraged Nancy Crick to enter palliative care, which she did for a number of days before returning home again.

Crick began a Ph. D. research project on measuring viscosity of water at high temperatures ( which he later described as " the dullest problem imaginable ") in the laboratory of physicist Edward Neville da Costa Andrade at University College, London, but with the outbreak of World War II ( in particular, an incident during the Battle of Britain when a bomb fell through the roof of the laboratory and destroyed his experimental apparatus ), Crick was deflected from a possible career in physics.

Crick was interested in two fundamental unsolved problems of biology: how molecules make the transition from the non-living to the living, and how the brain makes a conscious mind.

It was at this time of Crick ’ s transition from physics to biology that he was influenced by both Linus Pauling and Erwin Schrödinger.

Franklin shared this chemical knowledge with Watson and Crick when she pointed out to them that their first model ( from 1951, with the phosphates inside ) was obviously wrong.

In order to construct their model of DNA, Watson and Crick made use of information from unpublished X-ray diffraction images of Franklin's ( shown at meetings and freely shared by Wilkins ), including preliminary accounts of Franklin's results / photographs of the X-ray images that were included in a written progress report for the King's College laboratory of Sir John Randall from late 1952.

It is also not clear how important Franklin's unpublished results from the progress report actually were for the model-building done by Watson and Crick.

The key problem for Watson and Crick, which could not be resolved by the data from King's College, was to guess how the nucleotide bases pack into the core of the DNA double helix.

Francis Crick recognized the potential importance of the Griffith protein-only hypothesis for scrapie propagation in the second edition of his " Central dogma of molecular biology ": while asserting that the flow of sequence information from protein to protein, or from protein to RNA and DNA was " precluded ", he noted that Griffith's hypothesis was a potential contradiction ( although it was not so promoted by Griffith ).

This was revised in 1983 by Crick and Mitchison's " reverse learning " theory, which states that dreams are like the cleaning-up operations of computers when they are off-line, removing ( suppressing ) parasitic nodes and other " junk " from the mind during sleep.

* Crick Run: annual long distance run from Crick to Rugby

After the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 by Francis Crick and James D. Watson, Gamow attempted to solve the problem of how the order of the four different kinds of bases ( adenine, cytosine, thymine and guanine ) in DNA chains could control the synthesis of proteins from amino acids.

Francis Crick already worked in the Medical Research Council Unit, headed by Max Perutz and housed in the Cavendish Laboratory, when James Watson came from the United States and they made a breakthrough in discovering the structure of DNA.

This story was repeated by Crick in an interview with Matt Ridley ( Crick's biographer ), quotes from which are reported in the Daily Telegraph.

This information from Wilkins, along with additional information gained by Watson when he heard Franklin talk about her research during a King's College research meeting, stimulated Watson and Crick to create their first molecular model of DNA, a model with the phosphate backbones at the center.

Through Max Perutz, his thesis supervisor, Crick gained access to a progress report from King's College that included useful information from Franklin about the features of DNA she had deduced from her x-ray diffraction data.

Crick felt that this attitude encouraged him to be more daring than typical biologists who tended to concern themselves with the daunting problems of biology and not the past successes of physics.

* 1953 – James D. Watson and Francis Crick announce to friends that they have determined the chemical structure of DNA ; the formal announcement takes place on April 25 following publication in April's Nature ( pub.

The chemical nature of the germ plasm was discovered in 1953, when Francis Crick and James Watson explained the structure of DNA.

" The film also shows why Watson and Crick made their discovery, overtaking their competitors in part by reasoning from genetic function to predict chemical structure, thus helping to establish the then still-nascent field of molecular biology.

The double-helix model of DNA structure was first published in the journal Nature by James D. Watson and Francis Crick in 1953, ( X, Y, Z coordinates in 1954 ) based upon the crucial X-ray diffraction image of DNA labeled as " Photo 51 ", from Rosalind Franklin in 1952, followed by her more clarified DNA image with Raymond Gosling, Maurice Wilkins, Alexander Stokes, and Herbert Wilson, as well as base-pairing chemical and biochemical information by Erwin Chargaff.

What is hidden in the technical jargon of the title is that Rosalind Franklin's discovery of the chemical structure of DNA finally revealed to Watson and Crick how genetic instructions are stored inside organisms and passed from generation to generation.