The Crick Run in England in 1838 was the first recorded instance of an organised cross country competition.

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

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 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.

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

Crick had started to think about interactions between the bases.

In 1974 Crick started work on a biography of George Orwell with the help of Orwell's second wife Sonia Brownell.

A journalist specialising in politics, Crick started work at ITN in 1980.

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.

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.

Crick's access to Franklin's progress report of late 1952 is what made Crick confident that DNA was a double helix with antiparallel chains, but there were other chains of reasoning and sources of information that also led to these conclusions.

Furthermore, Watson and Crick suggested that DNA, the genetic material, is responsible for the synthesis of the thousands of proteins found in cells.

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.

However, the concept of RNA as a primordial molecule is older and can be found in papers by Crick and Orgel, as well as in Woese's 1967 book The Genetic Code.

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

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

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.

John Maddox, Natures editor, stated that " the Watson and Crick paper was not peer-reviewed by Nature ... the paper could not have been refereed: its correctness is self-evident.

It includes notable tunnels south of Crick 1528 yd ( 1397 m ) and north of Husbands Bosworth 1166 yd ( 1066 m ) The village of Crick is home to a popular annual boat show.

She seeks employment outside the village, where her past is not known, and secures a job as a milkmaid at Talbothays Dairy, working for Mr. and Mrs. Crick.

Intimately related to views on REM function in memory consolidation, Mitchison and Crick have proposed that by virtue of its inherent spontaneous activity, the function of REM sleep " is to remove certain undesirable modes of interaction in networks of cells in the cerebral cortex ", which process they characterize as " unlearning ".

Two decades later, Francis Crick predicted a functional RNA component which mediated translation ; he reasoned that RNA is better suited to base-pair with an mRNA transcript than a pure polypeptide.

The Crick Crack Club in London organize a yearly " Grand Lying Contest " with the winner being awarded the coveted " Hodja Cup " ( named for the Mulla Nasreddin: " The truth is something I have never spoken .").

* Ridley, Matt ; " Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code ( Eminent Lives )" was first published in June 2006 in the US and then in the UK September 2006, by HarperCollins Publishers ; 192 pp, ISBN 0-06-082333-X ; this short book is in the publisher's " Eminent Lives " series.

Other famous scientists, engineers, theorists and inventors from the UK include: Sir Francis Bacon, Richard Trevithick ( Train ), Thomas Henry Huxley, Francis Crick ( DNA ), Rosalind Franklin ( Photo 51 ), Robert Hooke, Humphry Davy, Robert Watson-Watt, J. J. Thomson ( discovered Electron ), James Chadwick ( discovered Neutron ), Frederick Soddy ( discovered Isotope ), John Cockcroft, Henry Bessemer, Edmond Halley, Sir William Herschel, Charles Parsons ( Steam turbine ), Alan Blumlein ( Stereo sound ), John Dalton ( Colour blindness ), James Dewar, Alexander Parkes ( celluloid ), Charles Macintosh, Ada Lovelace, Peter Durand, Alcock & Brown ( first non-stop transatlantic flight ), Henry Cavendish ( discovered Hydrogen ), Francis Galton, Sir Joseph Swan ( Incandescent light bulb ), Sir William Gull ( Anorexia nervosa ), Frank Pantridge, George Everest, Edward Whymper ( first ascent of Matterhorn ), Daniel Rutherford, Arthur Eddington ( luminosity of stars ), Lord Rayleigh ( why sky is blue ), Norman Lockyer ( discovered Helium ), Julian Huxley ( formed WWF ), Adam Smith ( pioneer of modern economics and capitalism ), John Herschel, Bertrand Russell ( analytic philosophy pioneer ), Jim Marshall ( guitar amplification pioneer ), Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Joseph Priestly and others.

It is also known locally as the " Crick Stone ".

One way to avoid this, according to Bernard Crick, is to have ideals that themselves are descriptive of a process, rather than an outcome.

This led Francis Crick to propose the concept of the adaptor or as it is now known " transfer RNA ( tRNA )".

In the 2006 film Stranger than Fiction, the main character, Harold Crick, is able to perform rapid arithmetic at the request of his co-workers.

It is bisected by the Welland River ( also known locally as Chippawa Creek or The Crick ).

Sir Bernard Rowland Crick ( 16 December 1929 – 19 December 2008 ) was a British political theorist and democratic socialist whose views can be summarised as ' politics is ethics done in public '.