Crick and the golden helix

Abstract

Francis Crick published a lucid and entertaining autobiography, What Mad Pursuit (1989), his belated response to his collaborator James Watson's confessional classic The Double Helix (1968), the publication of which Crick had vainly tried to prevent. An especially memorable sentence considers why the two of them—a hitherto undistinguished physicist (Crick) and a tyro biologist (Watson)—were able to discover the structure of DNA in 1951–53. “It's true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold, but the fact remains that we were looking for gold”, writes Crick. The revelation of DNA's molecular structure was a very good example, he thought, of Pasteur's adage that “chance favours the prepared mind”. Crick's scientific biographer, historian of science Robert Olby, thinks so too. His long-awaited and thorough study, Francis Crick: Hunter of Life's Secrets, captures the mixture of chance and preparation in great science clearly and candidly, if not as vividly as Crick and Watson. Both the necessary blundering about and the lucky stumbling are presented by Olby in much finer detail than in What Mad Pursuit and The Double Helix, or in science writer Matt Ridley's brief, enjoyable Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code (2006). Unlike Ridley, Olby knew Crick and his second wife well over decades, from 1966, and earned Crick's respect with his historical study The Path to the Double Helix (1974). After that appeared, Crick offered to cooperate with an intellectual biography, on condition it be published posthumously. The Crick family background (in the shoe industry) and his childhood and youth are in some ways reminiscent of Albert Einstein's, although Olby does not make the comparison. Both physicists came from provincial business families of limited financial success, with some interest in science, yet little intellectual distinction. Both did moderately well at school and college, but were not academic stars. Both were exposed to established religion, and rejected it in their teens; they had little intrinsic respect for authority, without being open rebels. Both followed unconventional early scientific careers, and were extroverts who loved to debate ideas with fellow scientists, at times devastatingly, although they were equally capable of long, solitary periods of concentration. Both men were appealing to women. Crick, however, took much longer than Einstein to make his mark. He was conscripted into scientific war work for the Admiralty throughout World War II. Then, he abandoned his formal career in physics and moved into biology. In addition, there was the sheer intractability of the subjects that passionately attracted him from the late 1940s to the end of his life: “the borderline between the living and the non-living, and the workings of the brain”, to quote his autobiography. In 1947, aged 31 years, he left a well-paid job at the Admiralty and went to learn cytology at the Strangeways Laboratory in Cambridge on a meagre Medical Research Council studentship. Crick's unceasing talk, often highly speculative, his penetrating laugh, and frank appraisals did not endear him to everyone—as first Watson, and now Olby, make abundantly clear. Of the pair, Crick was more of a theorist, with a talent for mathematics essential in interpreting X-ray diffraction patterns of biomolecules. But his theories remained always rooted in others' experimental evidence, whether in molecular biology or in the study of consciousness that preoccupied him from 1976, when he left Cambridge and settled at the Salk Institute in California. “He had an uncanny ability to analyse and criticise, in detail, the experiments of others”, remarks medical researcher and close Crick collaborator Mahlon Hoagland, “but at the bench he became mired in the day-to-day messiness and inconclusiveness”. There may be few real surprises in Olby's book for readers familiar with the major books in the field. It barely comments on some aspects of Crick's personal life, such as his first marriage and his relationships with his three children. But Olby certainly gives us the measure of Crick's coruscating mind and its fascinating symbiosis of optimism and pessimism about solving the most fundamental problems in life science. Andrew Robinson's Sudden Genius will be published by Oxford University Press later this year. Andrew Robinson's Sudden Genius will be published by Oxford University Press later this year.