Francis Harry Compton Crick, OM, FRS ( 8 June 1916 – 28 July 2004 ) was an English molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist, and most noted for being a co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953 together with James D. Watson.

Crick was an important theoretical molecular biologist and played a crucial role in research related to revealing the genetic code.

Francis Harry Compton Crick was the first son of Harry Crick ( 1887 – 1948 ) and Annie Elizabeth Crick, née Wilkins, ( 1879 – 1955 ).

He was born and raised in Weston Favell, then a small village near the English town of Northampton in which Crick ’ s father and uncle ran the family ’ s boot and shoe factory.

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.

" 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.

Crick died of colon cancer on 28 July 2004 at the University of California San Diego ( UCSD ) Thornton Hospital in La Jolla ; he was cremated and his ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean.

A public memorial was held on 27 September 2004 at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, near San Diego, California ; guest speakers included James D. Watson, Sydney Brenner, Alex Rich, Seymour Benzer, Aaron Klug, Christof Koch, Pat Churchland, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Tomaso Poggio, Leslie Orgel, Terry Sejnowski, his son Michael Crick, and his youngest daughter Jacqueline Nichols.

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.

Crick was witness to the kinds of errors that his co-workers made in their failed attempts to make a correct molecular model of the α helix ; these turned out to be important lessons that could be applied, in the future, to the helical structure of DNA.

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.

Of great importance to the model building effort of Watson and Crick was Rosalind Franklin's understanding of basic chemistry, which indicated that the hydrophilic phosphate-containing backbones of the nucleotide chains of DNA should be positioned so as to interact with water molecules on the outside of the molecule while the hydrophobic bases should be packed into the core.

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.

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.

Crick did not see Franklin's B form X-ray images ( Photo 51 ) until after the DNA double helix model was published.

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.

Thus, the Watson and Crick model was not the first " bases in " model to be proposed.

* 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.

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

When appointed Professor of Political Theory and Political Institutions at Sheffield in 1965 Crick told Beaver, the LSE student newspaper, that he was " going to a better place from the point of view of teaching students ".

The show takes place every year on the Grand Union Canal at Crick Marina.

Thus it became the place 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.

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 argued that traditional conceptualizations of the soul as a non-material being must be replaced by a materialistic understanding of how the brain produces mind.

Crick later became a PhD student and Honorary Fellow of Gonville and Caius College and mainly worked at the Cavendish Laboratory and the Medical Research Council ( MRC ) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.

For the better part of two years, Crick worked on the physical properties of cytoplasm at Cambridge's Strangeways Laboratory, headed by Honor Bridget Fell, with a Medical Research Council studentship, until he joined Max Perutz and John Kendrew at the Cavendish Laboratory.

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

Crick and Wilkins first met at King's College and not, as erroneously recorded by two authors, at the Admiralty during World War II.

Late in 1951, Crick started working with James D. Watson at Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, England.

Watson and Crick first made helical models with the phosphates at the center of the helices.

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.

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.

Sir Lawrence Bragg, the director of the Cavendish Laboratory, where Watson and Crick worked, gave a talk at Guys Hospital Medical School in London on Thursday 14 May 1953 which resulted in an article by Ritchie Calder in The News Chronicle of London, on Friday 15 May 1953, entitled " Why You Are You.

Sydney Brenner, Jack Dunitz, Dorothy Hodgkin, Leslie Orgel, and Beryl M. Oughton, were some of the first people in April 1953 to see the model of the structure of DNA, constructed by Crick and Watson ; at the time they were working at Oxford University's Chemistry Department.

All were impressed by the new DNA model, especially Brenner who subsequently worked with Crick at Cambridge in the Cavendish Laboratory and the new Laboratory of Molecular Biology.

Since that time, many prominent scholars, including Nobel laureates Crick, Pauling, Rich and Yonath, and others, including Brodsky, Berman, and Ramachandran, concentrated on the conformation of the collagen monomer.

At that time, Crick was not aware of Chargaff's rules and he made little of Griffith's calculations, although it did start him thinking about complementary replication.

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.

As related by Crick, Gamow suggested that the twenty combinations of four DNA bases taken three at a time correspond to twenty amino acids used to form proteins.

It was an opportune time for the founding of Midland, the youngest of the " Creek " or " Crick " towns.

Sydney Brenner, Jack Dunitz, Dorothy Hodgkin, Leslie Orgel, and Beryl M. Oughton, were some of the first people in April 1953 to see the model of the structure of DNA, constructed by Crick and Watson ; at the time they were working at Oxford University's Chemistry Department.

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.

To draw an example, Callenbach's fictional Crick School was based upon Pinel School, an alternative school located outside Martinez, California, and attended for a time by his son.

At that time Wilkins also introduced Francis Crick to the importance of DNA.

* Francis Crick talking about his time at Mill Hill on Peoples Archive

Together with Jack Dunitz, Dorothy Hodgkin, Leslie Orgel, and Beryl M. Oughton, he was one of the first people in April 1953 to see the model of the structure of DNA, constructed by Francis Crick and James Watson ; at the time he and the other scientists were working at Oxford University's Chemistry Department.

During his time at LSE, recollections of which appear in his contribution to My LSE, Crick craved for greater recognition than his Senior Lecturership signified.

Together with Sydney Brenner, Jack Dunitz, Dorothy Hodgkin, and Beryl M. Oughton he was one of the first people in April 1953 to see the model of the structure of DNA, constructed by Francis Crick and James Watson, at the time he and the other scientists were working at Oxford University's Chemistry Department.

This upset the widely held belief at the time of a popularized version of the " Central Dogma " of molecular biology posited by Nobel laureate Francis Crick, one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA ( along with James Watson and Rosalind Franklin ).

It was also in the early 1950s that Crick and Watson gave the double helix model of the DNA, at the same time as psychologists at the MIT including Kurt Lewin, Jacob Levy Moreno and Fritz Heider laid the foundations for group dynamics research which later developed into social network analysis.

It had 161 children on roll at the time from West Haddon and some surrounding villages-Yelvertoft, Crick, East Haddon and Naseby.

Wilkins at King's College, following a request from Crick and Watson ; this justification does not hold however for Crick who was not present at this November 1951 meeting, but who also was given access by Max Perutz to Franklin's MRC report data which prompted Crick and Watson to seek permission from Sir Lawrence Bragg -- who was at the time the head of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge — to publish in Nature their double-helix molecular model of DNA based on Franklin's and also Wilkins ' data.