50 Fun Facts About Francis Crick

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

The citation covered the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer.

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

Critics thought 'dogma' implied an unquestionable rule; he meant only a compelling idea without much evidence yet.

Crick's father and uncle ran a family business near Northampton making what?

He grew up in Weston Favell, then a small village outside the town.

Crick's grandfather Walter, an amateur naturalist, had two of what named after him?

He also wrote a survey of the local foraminifera.

In a garden shed, Crick's uncle Walter taught him chemistry, glass-blowing and how to make what?

By about twelve he had decided he preferred scientific answers to religious ones and stopped going to church.

From the age of 14 Crick was educated on a scholarship where in London?

The school later bought a bronze bust of him with a single golden helix.

Crick took his 1937 physics degree at which London institution?

He was later made an honorary fellow there and at two Cambridge colleges.

Crick's first PhD project, which he called 'the dullest problem imaginable', measured what?

It was in the UCL lab of the physicist Edward Andrade.

What put an end to Crick's first PhD during the Battle of Britain?

It destroyed his apparatus and deflected him from a career in physics.

During the war Crick worked for the Admiralty designing what?

One of his mines proved effective against German minesweepers.

At what age did Crick begin studying biology, in 1947?

He was part of a migration of physicists into biology after the war.

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

He had to trade the 'elegance and deep simplicity' of physics for messy evolved chemistry.

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

Since physics had succeeded, he reasoned, big advances must be possible in biology too, and he could be more daring.

Which book, read in 1946, helped persuade Crick to switch from physics to biology?

Schrodinger's book, along with Linus Pauling's example, made him think covalent bonds could store genetic information.

Which Cambridge college was Crick a PhD student and later honorary fellow of?

He later turned down its Mastership before leaving for California.

Who directed the Cavendish Laboratory where Crick worked, having won a Nobel Prize at 25?

Bragg was keen to beat Pauling to DNA after being pipped to the alpha helix.

John Randall, biophysics chief at which London institution, had refused Crick's application?

It was where his friend Maurice Wilkins worked, and where the crucial DNA X-ray data came from.

How old was Crick, still a graduate student, when the 23-year-old Watson arrived at the Cavendish?

The war had delayed his doctorate; Watson already had one.

With William Cochran and which mathematician did Crick develop the theory of helical X-ray diffraction?

The theory fitted alpha-helix proteins and later proved useful for DNA.

When did Crick himself first see Franklin's Photo 51?

It was Watson whom Wilkins showed the picture; Crick worked from Wilkins's B-form data and the MRC report.

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

Chargaff visited England in 1952 and drove the point home to Watson and Crick.

Which chemist confirmed for Watson and Crick the correct tautomeric forms of the DNA bases?

Getting the keto and amine forms right was essential for the hydrogen bonds to line up.

On which date in 1953 did Crick and Watson crack the structure of DNA?

The first paper appeared in Nature eight weeks later.

Crick's 1953 letter to his son explaining the double helix sold at auction in 2013 for roughly how much?

It remains the largest sum ever paid for a letter at auction.

Crick's letter to his son Michael began: 'Jim Watson and I have probably made a most important' what?

Michael was at a British boarding school at the time.

Bragg's talk at which London medical school on 14 May 1953 produced the first newspaper story?

The News Chronicle ran it the next day; The New York Times followed with a six-paragraph piece that was pulled from later editions.

How old was Crick when he finally completed his PhD in 1954?

The thesis was titled 'X-Ray Diffraction: Polypeptides and Proteins'.

Crick's 1954 postdoc supervisor David Harker was called 'the John Wayne of' what?

He worked there on ribonuclease and protein synthesis before returning to Cambridge.

Which physicist founded the 'RNA Tie Club', for which Crick wrote his 1956 paper on the coding problem?

Crick proposed there would be small 'adaptor molecules' linking nucleic acid sequences to amino acids.

Crick's proposed 'adaptor molecules' of 1956 turned out to be what?

His 'ribonucleic-protein complexes' became known as ribosomes.

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

He separated the materials, the energy and the information flow, and made information the organising idea of molecular biology.

On 15 April 1960, Crick and Brenner realised messenger RNA was not the same as what?

That summer Brenner, Jacob and Meselson ran the first experiment proving messenger RNA exists.

The 64 possible nucleotide triplets of the genetic code specify how many amino acids?

The code is 'degenerate': some amino acids have several triplets.

In which city did Marshall Nirenberg first announce his genetic-code results in 1961?

Nirenberg had used synthetic RNA as templates for protein synthesis in a test tube.

Crick and Leslie Orgel's 'directed panspermia' idea proposed that life on Earth was seeded by whom?

They later admitted they had been unduly pessimistic about life arising on Earth by itself.

In 1958 Cambridge turned Crick down for which professorship?

The electors could not agree; Lord Adrian offered it to Guido Pontecorvo, then reportedly to Crick, and both refused.

Crick spent his career after 1977 at which research centre in La Jolla, California?

He had been a nonresident fellow there since 1960 and 'felt at home in Southern California'.

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

He was struck that many neurobiologists treated it as a taboo subject.

In 1983 Crick and Graeme Mitchison proposed that REM sleep and dreaming serve to do what?

They called the hypothetical process 'reverse learning' or 'unlearning'.

With which neuroscientist did Crick publish a series of papers on visual awareness from 1990 to 2005?

They focused on how the brain generates visual awareness within a few hundred milliseconds.

Crick's 1994 book on the neuroscience of the mind was titled The Astonishing what?

Its subtitle was 'The Scientific Search for the Soul'.

What is the title of Crick's autobiographical book?

It explains why he abandoned molecular biology for neuroscience.

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

He had accepted the fellowship in 1960 partly because the new college had no chapel.

Which honour did Crick refuse in 1963?

He was often wrongly called 'Sir Francis' anyway; he accepted the Order of Merit in 1991.

For roughly how much did Crick's Nobel medal sell at auction in 2013?

A fifth of the price went to the Francis Crick Institute in London.

Crick died of colon cancer in 2004. Where were his ashes scattered?

He was reportedly editing a manuscript on his deathbed, 'a scientist until the bitter end'.

Crick shared a Pimlico flat with which future BBC newsreader, a former Royal Navy associate?

Westminster City Council put a green plaque on the building in 2007.

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

He signed the Humanist Manifesto in 2003 and thought Christianity 'may be OK between consenting adults in private'.

Crick's 1969 'biochemical theology' idea of studying the praying brain became what field?

'So many people pray,' he wrote, 'that one finds it hard to believe that they do not get some satisfaction from it.'

The Francis Crick Institute in London, opened in 2016, is the largest biomedical research centre where?

It cost £660 million and unites Cancer Research UK, three universities, the MRC and the Wellcome Trust.