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.

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 in the right place, in the right frame of mind, at the right time ( 1949 ), to join Max Perutz ’ s project at Cambridge University, and he began to work on the X-ray crystallography of proteins.

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.

As first discovered by James D. Watson and Francis Crick, the structure of DNA of all species comprises two helical chains each coiled round the same axis, and each with a pitch of 34 ångströms ( 3. 4 nanometres ) and a radius of 10 ångströms ( 1. 0 nanometres ).

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.

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.

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

During their model building, Crick and Watson learned that an antiparallel orientation of the two nucleotide chain backbones worked best to orient the base pairs in the centre of a double helix.

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.

Past lecturers include Odile Crick, wife of Francis Crick ; she created the simple iconic image of DNA as two intertwined ribbons linked by ten rungs per turn of the double helix that appeared in the article in Nature announcing the discovery of its structure.

The school expanded and moved within two years to 17 Crick Road, which became known as " School House ".

In the semiconservative hypothesis, proposed by Watson and Crick, the two strands of a DNA molecule separate during replication.

James D. Watson and Francis Crick were the two co-discoverers of the structure of DNA in 1953.

However, the route does not keep as strictly to contours as the early canals of James Brindley did ; the worst potential diversions were avoided by cuttings, embankments, and two significant tunnels, one of at Crick and another of at Husbands Bosworth, both of which were wide enough for narrowboats to pass.

After realizing the structural similarity of the A: T and C: G pairs, Watson and Crick soon produced their double helix 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.

Key data from Wilkins, Stokes, and Wilson, and, separately, by Franklin and Gosling, were published in two separate additional articles in the same issue of Nature with the article by Watson and Crick.

Crick, however, knowing the Fourier transforms of Bessel functions that represent the X-ray diffraction patterns of helical structures of atoms, correctly interpreted further one of Dr. Franklin's experimental findings as indicating that DNA was most likely to be a double helix with the two polynucleotide chains running in opposite directions.

This extends the fundamental process identified by Francis Crick, in which the sequence is: DNA → RNA → protein.

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.

In his autobiography, What Mad Pursuit, Francis Crick wrote about his choice of the word dogma and some of the problems it caused him:

However, Watson and Crick soon identified several problems with these models:

Further west, problems were encountered at Crick, where the rocks were unsuitable for tunnelling, and quicksands were found.

In 1947, Crick began studying biology and became part of an important migration of physical scientists into biology research.

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 is the central dogma of molecular biology as stated by Francis Crick.

* April 25-Francis Crick and James D. Watson of the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory publish " Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid " in the British journal Nature ( first announced on February 28 at a Solvay Conference ), often ranked as one of the most dramatic results in biology during the 20th century because of the structural beauty and functional logic of the DNA double helix.

* 1953 – Crick and Watson: helical structure of DNA, basis for molecular biology

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 ).

" 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.

In his molecular biology period, Benzer dissected the fine structure of a single gene, laying down the ground work for decades of mutation analysis and genetic engineering, and setting up a paradigm using the rII phage that would later be used by Francis Crick and Sidney Brenner to establish the triplet code of DNA.