Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code (Eminent Lives) (rough edge) - Hardcover

Ridley, Matt

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 006082333X ISBN 13: 9780060823337

Publisher: Eminent Lives, 2006

Synopsis

Francis Crick, who died at the age of eighty-eight in 2004, will be bracketed with Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein as one of the great scientists of all time. Between 1953 and 1966 he made and led a revolution in biology by discovering, quite literally, the secret of life: the digital cipher at the heart of heredity that distinguishes living from non-living things -- the genetic code. His own discoveries -- though he always worked with one other partner and did much of his thinking in conversation -- include not only the double helix but the whole mechanism of protein synthesis, the three-letter nature of the code, and much of the code itself.

Matt Ridley's biography traces Crick's life from middle-class mediocrity in the English Midlands, through a lackluster education and six years designing magnetic mines for the Royal Navy, to his leap into biology at the age of thirty-one. While at Cambridge, he suddenly began to display the unique visual imagination and intense tenacity of thought that would allow him to see the solutions to several great scientific conundrums -- and to see them long before most biologists had even conceived of the problems. Having set out to determine what makes living creatures alive and having succeeded, he immigrated at age sixty to California and turned his attention to the second question that had fascinated him since his youth: What makes conscious creatures conscious? Time ran out before he could find the answer.

About this title

About the Author

Matt Ridley's books—including The Red Queen, Genome, The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, How Innovation Works, and most recently, Viral: the Search for the Origin of Covid-19 (with Alina Chan)—have sold over a million copies, been translated into 31 languages, and won several awards. He sat in the House of Lords from 2013 and 2021, and was founding chairman of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle. He created the “Mind and Matter” column in the Wall Street Journal in 2010, and was a columnist for the Times. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives in Northumberland.

From the Back Cover

Francis Crick, who died at the age of eighty-eight in 2004, will be bracketed with Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein as one of the great scientists of all time. Between 1953 and 1966 he made and led a revolution in biology by discovering, quite literally, the secret of life: the digital cipher at the heart of heredity that distinguishes living from non-living things -- the genetic code. His own discoveries -- though he always worked with one other partner and did much of his thinking in conversation -- include not only the double helix but the whole mechanism of protein synthesis, the three-letter nature of the code, and much of the code itself.

Matt Ridley's biography traces Crick's life from middle-class mediocrity in the English Midlands, through a lackluster education and six years designing magnetic mines for the Royal Navy, to his leap into biology at the age of thirty-one. While at Cambridge, he suddenly began to display the unique visual imagination and intense tenacity of thought that would allow him to see the solutions to several great scientific conundrums -- and to see them long before most biologists had even conceived of the problems. Having set out to determine what makes living creatures alive and having succeeded, he immigrated at age sixty to California and turned his attention to the second question that had fascinated him since his youth: What makes conscious creatures conscious? Time ran out before he could find the answer.

Reviews

Francis Crick (1916–2004) is a natural addition to the Eminent Lives series. Best known for his codiscovery of the structure of DNA alongside James Watson, Crick is a canonical figure in modern science; award-winning British science writer Ridley (The Agile Gene) is an expert and distinguished author of popular books on biological science. But one wishes the strictures of this series gave Ridley more space in which to work; the prose is crisp and forthright, but he barely has enough room to recount the basic contours of Crick's voracious scientific career, leaving the reader with but a few fleeting glimpses of the man's deeper character. Readers of Watson's The Double Helix who pick up this book looking for a similarly idiosyncratic portrait of a scientific life will be disappointed, but one might argue that this spare, straightforward volume is a more fitting tribute to a scientist who lived a relatively modest public life while striving to understand the basic workings of life and consciousness. (June 1)
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"Because of the momentous nature of his discovery Francis Crick must eventually be bracketed with Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein as one of the great scientists of all times," Ridley writes in this first biography of the codiscoverer of the structure of DNA. "He trained his mind to be exquisitely good at solving nature’s puzzles using logic, had the courage to take on the biggest problems, and threw himself exuberantly into the task, never letting prejudice stand in the way of reason. Throughout, he stayed true to himself: ebullient, loquacious, charming, sceptical, tenacious." Ridley, a well-known British science writer, unfolds Crick’s life from its modest beginnings on "a middle-class street in a middle-size town in the . . . English Midlands" through his uninspired physics career (six years designing magnetic mines for the Royal Navy) to his sudden switch into biology at the age of 31, when "with the bravado of a bankrupt gambler," he tried to decide what he would solve first, "the secret of the brain or the secret of life." In a stunning combination of visual and intellectual imagination, he and James Watson figured out the double helix of DNA, the secret of life. At age 60 he immigrated to California and focused his logic and energy on the nature of consciousness. He died in 2004, at 88, still working on this second quest.

Editors of Scientific American

The codiscoverer with James Watson of the structure of DNA in 1953, Francis Crick died in 2004, doing science to the last. This timely biography in the Eminent Lives series covers the fabled controversies of the DNA story, but Ridley (Genome, 2000) is quite as committed to elucidating Crick's second great achievement, his discovery of DNA's fundamental coding scheme. Ridley's fluency in the pertinent molecular biology is refined by his stylistic clarity. He explains how the coding problem was recognized as the next challenge after the double helix was ascertained, and how other big-name scientists went down blind alleys whereas Crick found the correct answer. Ridley attributes Crick's success in part to his manner of attacking scientific problems. His teamwork with Watson was a lifelong pattern: Crick allied with a partner who liked theorizing out loud. At parties, pubs, and conferences, Crick was always talking. His conviviality binds the entire narrative, which covers Crick's weapons research in World War II, his haunts and marriages, and his fortunes in academia. A briskly written essential for the DNA shelf. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Francis Crick

Discoverer of the Genetic CodeBy Matt Ridley

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright ©2006 Matt Ridley
All right reserved.
ISBN: 006082333X

Chapter One

Crackers

Francis harry compton crick was born on 8 June 1916, at the height of World War I. The day before he was born, the news had broken that Lord Kitchener, Britain's celebrated minister of war, had been killed on board a cruiser bound for Russia. When Crick was a few weeks old, the first day of the battle of the Somme would claim 20,000 British lives. Far away from all this death, Crick was born at home in Holmfield Way in Northampton, a middle-class street in a middle-size town in the middle of the English Midlands. He was the son of a shoe manufacturer, Northampton being the shoemaking capital of Britain. Its streets were full of workshops and factories where leather-aproned workers still hammered and stitched soles, heels, and uppers. Shoemaking was an increasingly mechanised trade, thanks partly to the invention of one Thomas Crick of Leicester, who in 1853 took out a patent for an improved method of fixing uppers to soles with tacks or rivets instead of stitches. But, perhaps fortunately for posterity, Thomas Crick was no ancestor of Francis, who consequently was spared the distractions of great wealth.

Crick's Y chromosome had not wandered far in two centuries, or perhaps for much longer. Crick is not an uncommon surname in the Midlands, the village of Crick in Northamptonshire being its probable origin. In 1861 Francis's great-grandfather Charles Crick was a fairly prosperous farmer, employing 20 men and boys on his 231 acres at Pindon End farm near the lace-making village of Hanslope just 10 miles south of Northampton. Charles's second son, Walter Drawbridge Crick, born in 1857, took a job as a clerk in the goods department of the London and Northwestern Railway, whose track bisected his father's farm. He soon switched to working as a travelling salesman for a shoemaker called Smeed and Warren. In 1880, when he was just 22 years old, he joined two others to start his own boot and shoe factory: Latimer, Crick, and Gunn, at Green Street, Northampton. (The churchyard at Hanslope has several Latimers buried in it, as well as some Cricks, so perhaps Latimer was a family friend.) The business thrived and expanded to Madras in India. At one time it also had five shops in London, and later it made military boots for those doomed young men at the Somme. By 1898 William Latimer and Thomas Gunn had retired, leaving Walter Crick the sole owner of the firm. He did well enough to build a substantial stone mansion, Nine Springs Villa, on Billing Road on the eastern side of Northampton. But five years later Walter Crick (at age 47) died of a heart attack, leaving the firm in the hands of his widow, Sarah -- who survived him by 31 years -- and two of his four sons, Walter and Harry, who carried on the business until it failed during the Depression.

The original Walter's enthusiasm for shoes, lucrative though it was, seems to have come second to his passion for science, and for collecting -- fossils, books, stamps, coins, porcelain, and furniture. His friends found him energetic and argumentative. Said one, in terms that might later have been applied to the grandson: "He was just as fond of springing a new and carefully stored fact into a discussion as he was of trumping a suit the first time round." He was an amateur naturalist of some local repute, who eventually wrote a two-part survey of the Liassic foraminifera of Northamptonshire and had two gastropods named after him. On foot and bicycle, he wandered the lanes of Northamptonshire collecting fossils and turning over rocks to look for snails. It was a tiny mollusc that caused Walter, grandfather of the greatest biologist of the twentieth century, to forge a brief link with the greatest biologist of the nineteenth: Charles Darwin.

It happened thus. On Saturday, 18 February 1882, Walter Crick was out hunting for water beetles (a curious occupation in winter, surely). We know this because later that day he wrote hesitantly to Darwin to report what he had found. "I secured a female Dytiscus marginalis," he told the great evolutionist, "with a small bivalve [cockle] that I think is Sphaerium corneum very firmly attached to its leg." Darwin replied three days later with a barrage of questions. He wanted to know the length and breadth of the shell, and how much of the leg (which leg?) had been caught; and he suggested a communication to the magazine Nature. To a young railway clerk turned shoemaker with (to judge by his handwriting) only a rudimentary education, this reply must have been a matter for some excitement. Crick replied with not only the answers, but also the beetle and the shell. Both arrived alive, so Darwin put the "wretched" insect in a bottle with chopped laurel leaves, "that it may die an easy and quicker death." He then sent both specimens off to an expert on shells for identification, but the expert was away and the specimens were returned, broken, by a servant. Meanwhile, Crick had returned to the same pond on a Sunday and found a dead frog with a cockle of the same kind attached to its foot. On 6 April, Darwin published a letter in Nature describing Crick's cockles, as a triumphant vindication of his long-held theory that peripatetic molluscs hitch lifts with other animals to get from pond to pond. It was to be Darwin's last publication: 13 days later, he died.

Walter and Sarah Crick had five children, born between 1886 and 1898. They were destined to grow to adulthood just as the relative peace and freedom of Edwardian England vanished, and they suffered their share of disappointments in the 30 years of war and slump that followed. The eldest, Walter, as senior director of the business, gets the family's blame for the failure of the shoe firm in the mid-1930s. One of the causes -- or consequences -- may have been his passionate interest in a . . .

Continues...

Excerpted from Francis Crickby Matt Ridley Copyright ©2006 by Matt Ridley. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Eminent Lives
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 006082333X
• ISBN 13: 9780060823337
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224