50 Fun Facts About Francis Crick

With Watson and which other scientist did Crick share the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine?

Maurice Wilkins, who took the first sharp X-ray pictures of DNA, shared it; the same year Max Perutz and John Kendrew of Crick's own Cambridge unit won the Chemistry prize, so one laboratory toasted two Nobel Prizes at once.

What two-word term did Crick coin for the idea that information in a polypeptide cannot flow back to nucleic acid?

Central dogma was a name Crick came to regret: he meant a grand idea with little evidence behind it, until Jacques Monod pointed out that a dogma is a belief that cannot be doubted.

Crick's father and uncle ran a family factory in Northampton making what?

Boots and shoes made Northampton the capital of British shoemaking; Crick's grandfather founded the firm, and a share in it kept the family comfortably off until the business went into decline.

Which naturalist's last published paper described a water beetle sent to him by Crick's grandfather?

Charles Darwin seized on the beetle, which had a tiny cockle clamped to its leg, as proof that molluscs hitch lifts between ponds; his letter ran in Nature on 6 April 1882, and he died 13 days later.

In Who's Who, Crick listed his recreation as what, 'especially with pretty women'?

Conversation was how Crick did his science as well as how he relaxed: he worked out ideas in long talks with collaborators, and Watson wrote that the sound of his voice could drive the head of the laboratory to a safer room.

From the age of 14, Crick boarded on a scholarship at which London school?

Mill Hill taught him physics, chemistry and mathematics well but, as he recalled it, gave no lessons on heredity, so the man who later cracked the gene's code picked up Mendel's laws for himself.

Crick took his 1937 physics degree at which London institution?

University College London sent the future Nobel laureate away with only a second-class degree in physics; his gifts showed once he left the subject for biology ten years later.

Crick's first PhD project, which he called 'the dullest problem imaginable', set out to measure what?

The viscosity of hot water, above 100 degrees and under pressure, was a topic handed to him by his professor; he spent two years building the apparatus to measure it before war broke out and ended the work.

What finally destroyed the laboratory apparatus Crick had spent two years building for his physics PhD?

A German bomb hit the laboratory during the war and wrecked the equipment he had left behind; he never returned to the project, and once peace came he gave up physics for biology.

During the war Crick worked for the Admiralty designing what?

Magnetic and acoustic mines were his war work: one of his designs was made deliberately insensitive, so that it ignored ordinary sweeping and went off only beneath the big enemy ships sent ahead to clear a path.

Which Hollywood actor played James Watson opposite Tim Pigott-Smith's Crick in the BBC's 1987 drama Life Story?

Jeff Goldblum made Watson too manic and forever chewing gum, Crick complained in his memoir, though he judged that the film 'tells a good story at a good pace' and counted it a success.

Crick said switching from physics to biology was almost like what?

Being born again was how it felt at 31: physics had given him a few elegant, simple laws, while biology offered intricate mechanisms assembled by evolution and demanded experimental evidence at every step.

What did Crick say the experience of learning physics had taught him, to biology's benefit?

Hubris was his own word: 'the hubris of the physicist', the feeling that since physics had succeeded so spectacularly, there was no reason other sciences such as biology should not do the same.

Which short book by a quantum physicist helped persuade Crick to switch from physics to biology?

What Is Life? was Erwin Schrödinger's attempt to explain the gene through physics; it convinced Crick that great discoveries were just around the corner, and it fired up the young James Watson too.

Which Cambridge college admitted Crick for his second attempt at a PhD?

Gonville and Caius took him in his thirties, a decade older than most students, because his first doctorate had been abandoned years before; the college now shows off a stained-glass double helix in its dining hall.

Who directed the Cavendish Laboratory while Crick worked on DNA there, having won a Nobel Prize at 25?

Lawrence Bragg had lost the race for the alpha helix to Linus Pauling, which he called the biggest mistake of his career, so he lifted his ban on Crick and Watson's DNA work rather than be beaten twice.

Which London college housed John Randall's biophysics unit, source of the crucial X-ray pictures of DNA?

King's College London housed Randall's unit; a research-council report on its results, passed to Crick by Max Perutz in February 1953, showed him that the molecule's two chains must run in opposite directions.

James Watson's bestselling memoir opens by saying he had never seen Crick in what kind of mood?

A modest mood: the line so angered Crick that his protests made Harvard's press drop the book, though he later decided that its unflattering portrait was really of Watson, not of himself.

What one-word name did Crick give the loose pairing he proposed in 1966 for the third letter of a code word?

Wobble solved a puzzle: cells get by with far fewer adaptor molecules than there are three-letter code words, because slack at the third position lets a single adaptor read several of them.

Watson saw Photo 51 in January 1953; by his own account, when did Crick first see it?

After drafting the paper: Crick wrote in 1974 that when the first draft went off he 'had not seen the picture at all'; what he had studied was a research-council report giving the X-ray measurements.

The Chargaff ratios showed that in DNA the amount of adenine equals the amount of what?

Thymine matches adenine because the two always pair up across the double helix, a fit Watson found by shuffling cardboard cut-outs of the bases; it turned Chargaff's rough ratios into an exact rule.

Which chemist sharing their office told Watson and Crick that the textbook shapes of the DNA bases were wrong?

Jerry Donohue, a former student of Linus Pauling, said the bases were ketones, not the enols printed in the books; with the corrected shapes cut out in cardboard, the matching pairs fell into place.

According to Watson, in which Cambridge pub did Crick announce they had found 'the secret of life'?

The Eagle was where the Cavendish physicists lunched; Watson wrote that Crick 'winged into' it on 28 February 1953 to tell everyone within earshot, though Crick himself had no memory of doing so.

Crick's 1953 letter explaining the double helix fetched a record $6 million at auction in 2013; who was it written to?

His son Michael, then 12 and away at boarding school, got seven handwritten pages with a sketch of the helix, signed 'Lots of love, Daddy'; the sale beat the record held by a letter of Abraham Lincoln's.

Who drew the now-famous diagram of the double helix printed in Crick and Watson's 1953 paper in Nature?

Odile Crick, Francis's wife, was an artist with no scientific training; her spare sketch became the emblem of molecular biology, yet she later said she had thought nothing of his talk of a big discovery.

Crick and Watson are said to have tossed a coin to settle what about their 1953 DNA paper?

Whose name came first was left to the coin, which is why the world says 'Watson and Crick' even though Crick was the elder by nearly twelve years and comes first in the alphabet.

Which former rival in the race for DNA stayed at the Cricks' home while recovering from cancer treatment?

Rosalind Franklin bore no grudge and became a good friend of the family; she spent her last remission from ovarian cancer in their house before her death in 1958, aged 37.

With which South African-born biologist did Crick share an office for twenty years while cracking the code of life?

Sydney Brenner joined him in Cambridge in 1957, and their daily talk across the desks paid off in 1961, when the pair showed that the code is read three letters at a time.

Which cosmologist founded the 'RNA Tie Club', the circle of code-breakers for whom Crick wrote up his adaptor idea?

George Gamow gave each member a tie and the name of an amino acid, Crick's being tyrosine; the club never once met, yet the notes it passed round included one of the most important unpublished papers in science.

The 'adaptor molecules' that Crick predicted in 1955 turned out to be what?

Transfer RNAs were being isolated in an American lab just as Crick aired his idea in public; he had pictured adaptors only a few units long, and the real ones turned out to run to about eighty.

Crick's one-way information flow runs from DNA to RNA to what?

Protein is where the information stops: when an enzyme that copies RNA back into DNA turned up in 1970, the journal Nature declared Crick's rule reversed, and he replied that it had only ever barred the way out of protein.

In April 1960, Crick suddenly saw that the cell's messenger RNA could not be the same thing as what?

Ribosomal RNA had been assumed to carry each gene's message; hearing François Jacob describe new results from Paris, Crick and a colleague saw that a separate, short-lived messenger must exist, and it was found within a year.

The 64 possible three-letter words of DNA's code specify how many standard amino acids?

20 was the list Crick and Watson themselves settled on, striking out rarities such as hydroxyproline; with 64 triplets to share among so few, most amino acids are spelled by several different ones.

In which city did Crick have Marshall Nirenberg repeat his 1961 code-breaking talk to the full congress?

Moscow hosted the 1961 biochemistry congress where the American biochemist showed that a chain of one repeated RNA letter makes a chain of one amino acid, the first word of the code to be read.

Crick and Leslie Orgel proposed in 1973 that life on Earth was seeded by what?

Intelligent aliens might have packed microbes into an unmanned spaceship and sent them to the lifeless young Earth, an idea the pair called directed panspermia; Crick later expanded it into a whole book.

In the late 1950s Cambridge passed over Crick for which professorship?

Genetics was the chair that R. A. Fisher hoped Crick would inherit, but the electors deadlocked, one of them strongly opposed, and the vice-chancellor ended up appointing John Thoday instead.

After 1977 Crick spent the rest of his career at which California research centre?

The Salk had counted him as a non-resident fellow since its early days; he came for a sabbatical year in 1976, felt at home in Southern California, and never moved back to England.

Crick's research in his final decades focused on the scientific study of what?

Consciousness had tempted him since 1947, when his 'gossip test' of what he most liked to talk about left two mysteries to choose from, life and the mind; he simply took them in turn.

Crick and Graeme Mitchison summed up their 1983 theory of REM sleep in the line 'We dream in order to' what?

Forget was the point: in their 'reverse learning' theory, dream sleep weakens the spurious links that build up in the brain's overloaded networks, the opposite of the usual idea that dreams fix memories in place.

With which neuroscientist did Crick write a long series of joint papers from 1990 until his death?

Christof Koch became the closest collaborator of Crick's last decades, and Crick was still correcting their final joint paper in the days before he died.

Crick's 1994 book was titled The Astonishing what?

Hypothesis: the astonishing claim was that your joys, sorrows and sense of free will are no more than the behaviour of nerve cells, or, as he put it with a nod to Alice in Wonderland, 'You're nothing but a pack of neurons.'

What is the title of Crick's autobiographical book?

What Mad Pursuit takes its title from Keats, and in it Crick turns the legend round: rather than Watson and Crick making the DNA structure, he wrote, 'the structure made Watson and Crick'.

Crick resigned his fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge in protest at a decision to build what?

A chapel had no place in a modern college of science, he told Winston Churchill, enclosing ten guineas towards a college brothel on the same grounds: that nobody would be obliged to go in.

Which honour did Crick accept in 1991?

The Order of Merit has only 24 members at a time; Crick had turned down a CBE, feeling that such honours set a scientist on a pedestal, yet he was often wrongly called 'Sir Francis' all the same.

Which of Crick's possessions sold at auction in 2013 for over $2 million?

His Nobel medal went for $2.27 million, then a record for a Nobel, to the head of a Shanghai biotech firm who pledged to use it to encourage his scientists; the family gave a fifth of the proceeds to the new Crick Institute.

Where were Crick's ashes scattered after his death in California in 2004?

The Pacific Ocean received his ashes after he was cremated; he had gone on working to the very end, correcting a scientific paper only days before he died.

What name did the Cricks give their Cambridge house, with its metal spiral fixed above the front door?

The Golden Helix was a single gilded spiral, not a double one; behind it the tall terraced house in Portugal Place became famous for parties that mixed artists with scientists.

Crick called himself a sceptic and an agnostic with 'a strong inclination towards' what?

Atheism set in early: at about twelve he told his mother that he no longer wished to go to church, and as a famous scientist he enjoyed poking fun at religion in public lectures.

Crick proposed a science of 'biochemical theology' to study the brain during which act?

Prayer, he reasoned, must do something measurable: so many people pray that they surely get some satisfaction from it, so its chemistry deserved a laboratory.

Crick and Watson's 1953 paper includes the famously coy line 'It has not escaped our notice…'; what had they noticed?

How DNA copies itself, each strand a template for the other, was the great implication; Crick wanted to spell it out, Watson feared the structure might be wrong, and the one sly sentence was their compromise.