Francis Crick Trivia
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50 free Francis Crick trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Francis Crick trivia quiz covers the physicist-turned-biologist who talked his way to the structure of DNA and then spent thirty years asking how the brain makes a mind. The easy questions handle the double helix, Watson, the 1962 Nobel Prize, the central dogma and the Salk Institute. From there it moves through the life: the shoe factory in Northampton, the grandfather who wrote to Darwin, the uncle's garden shed, the wartime mines, the abandoned thesis on the viscosity of water and the book by Schrodinger that changed everything. The harder end covers the helical diffraction theory, the ages at which he started biology and finished his PhD, the RNA Tie Club, adaptor molecules and messenger RNA, the letter to his son that broke auction records, directed panspermia, the chapel he resigned over, the CBE he refused, the REM-sleep theory, the Astonishing Hypothesis and the man who called himself an agnostic 'with a strong inclination towards atheism'. Every answer was checked against Crick's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our DNA and famous scientists quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01With Watson and which other scientist did Crick share the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine?
Maurice Wilkins
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.
Q 02What two-word term did Crick coin for the idea that information in a polypeptide cannot flow back to nucleic acid?
Central dogma
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.
Q 03Crick's father and uncle ran a family factory in Northampton making what?
Boots and shoes
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.
Q 04Which naturalist's last published paper described a water beetle sent to him by Crick's grandfather?
Charles Darwin
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.
Q 05In Who's Who, Crick listed his recreation as what, 'especially with pretty women'?
Conversation
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.
Q 06From the age of 14, Crick boarded on a scholarship at which London school?
Mill Hill
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.
Q 07Crick took his 1937 physics degree at which London institution?
University College
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.
Q 08Crick's first PhD project, which he called 'the dullest problem imaginable', set out to measure what?
The viscosity of hot water
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.
Q 09What finally destroyed the laboratory apparatus Crick had spent two years building for his physics PhD?
A German bomb
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.
Q 10During the war Crick worked for the Admiralty designing what?
Magnetic and acoustic mines
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.
Q 11Which Hollywood actor played James Watson opposite Tim Pigott-Smith's Crick in the BBC's 1987 drama Life Story?
Jeff Goldblum
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.
Q 12Crick said switching from physics to biology was almost like what?
Being born again
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.
Q 13What did Crick say the experience of learning physics had taught him, to biology's benefit?
Hubris
Q 21The Chargaff ratios showed that in DNA the amount of adenine equals the amount of what?
Thymine
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.
Q 22Which chemist sharing their office told Watson and Crick that the textbook shapes of the DNA bases were wrong?
Jerry Donohue
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.
Q 23According to Watson, in which Cambridge pub did Crick announce they had found 'the secret of life'?
The Eagle
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.
Q 14Which short book by a quantum physicist helped persuade Crick to switch from physics to biology?
What Is Life?
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.
Q 15Which Cambridge college admitted Crick for his second attempt at a PhD?
Gonville and Caius
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.
Q 16Who directed the Cavendish Laboratory while Crick worked on DNA there, having won a Nobel Prize at 25?
Lawrence Bragg
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.
Q 17Which London college housed John Randall's biophysics unit, source of the crucial X-ray pictures of DNA?
King's
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.
Q 18James Watson's bestselling memoir opens by saying he had never seen Crick in what kind of mood?
A modest 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.
Q 19What one-word name did Crick give the loose pairing he proposed in 1966 for the third letter of a code word?
Wobble
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.
Q 20Watson saw Photo 51 in January 1953; by his own account, when did Crick first see it?
After drafting the paper
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 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.
Q 24Crick's 1953 letter explaining the double helix fetched a record $6 million at auction in 2013; who was it written to?
His son
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.
Q 25Who drew the now-famous diagram of the double helix printed in Crick and Watson's 1953 paper in Nature?
Odile Crick
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.
Q 26Crick and Watson are said to have tossed a coin to settle what about their 1953 DNA paper?
Whose name came first
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.
Q 27Which former rival in the race for DNA stayed at the Cricks' home while recovering from cancer treatment?
Rosalind Franklin
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.
Q 28With which South African-born biologist did Crick share an office for twenty years while cracking the code of life?
Sydney Brenner
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.
Q 29Which cosmologist founded the 'RNA Tie Club', the circle of code-breakers for whom Crick wrote up his adaptor idea?
George Gamow
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.
Q 30The 'adaptor molecules' that Crick predicted in 1955 turned out to be what?
Transfer RNAs
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.