Surprising new biography of Francis Crick unravels the story of DNA

Crick: A mind in motion – from DNA to brain
Matthew Cobb, Profile Books, UK; Basic Books, United States

Francis Crick missed a crucial seminar in 1951, probably because he was seeing a lover. James Watson went there, didn’t take notes and misremembered key details. As a result, their first DNA model was embarrassing.

This is one of the many fascinating details of Crick: A mind on the move – from DNA to brain, a biography of the zoologist and writer Matthew Cobb. If you are interested in how the structure of DNA was discovered and what happened next, this is the book to read.

The son of traders, Crick didn’t do well enough at school to get into Oxbridge, got a second class degree and was doing a very boring PhD on the viscosity of water until he was sent to work on sea mines during the Second World War. In 1947, he was a civil servant with a failed marriage and his son lived with his grandparents. But Crick’s reading had left him fascinated by the molecular foundations of life and consciousness. He returned to research, first working in an independent laboratory in Cambridge, UK.

In 1949, he began to study the structure of biological molecules by observing how they diffract X-rays. His notebooks listed his errors: spills, poorly loaded films, misplaced samples, etc. Crick twice flooded the hallway outside his boss’s office and annoyed his colleagues by talking endlessly to Watson. The two men were banished to an isolated room.

By 1952, Crick had a new family, but he was broke and in danger of being fired by his boss, Lawrence Bragg. Then Bragg’s rival, biochemist Linus Pauling, claimed that he had discovered the structure of DNA. He was wrong, but Bragg didn’t want Pauling to get there first, so he gave Crick and Watson the green light to work on DNA. By March 1953, they had solved the problem.

Yes, chemist Rosalind Franklin’s data was vital – but Crick and Watson didn’t steal it, Cobb writes. He also found articles suggesting that Crick, Watson, Franklin and his colleague Maurice Wilkins were all more collaborative than previously thought.

Many forget that Crick and Watson cited Franklin and Wilkins in their famous Nature paper and that the articles by Franklin and Wilkins appeared next to it. Franklin also became friends with Crick and Odile, his second wife, often staying with them during her recovery from the cancer operations that killed her. This early death is the reason she did not share their 1962 Nobel Prize.

Crick later played a major role in discovering how DNA encoded proteins, gaining many important insights into the process. The biography has been a gripping read so far, but here it fades a bit, reflecting Crick’s life rather than Cobb’s writing. After the genetic code was deciphered in the 1960s, Crick published a series of bad papers, and in 1971 he experienced what was probably a breakdown.

He moved to California in 1977, turning his attention to consciousness. Cobb says his contributions were as important as his work in molecular biology, in that he proposed or popularized now-common approaches, such as the discovery of the brain “connectome.”

This book is also about Crick the man, and he was a curious mix. Anti-religious and anti-monarchy, the book details how he had an open second marriage, supported the legalization of cannabis, took acid and threw wild parties at which pornography was sometimes shown. It also notes that he made unwanted sexual advances toward several women.

Additionally, he corresponded with racists about IQ and genetics, then came to believe that this issue was more complex than he initially thought, Cobb writes. Crick never spoke about it after the 1970s – unlike Watson, who died last week aged 97.

It is clear that Crick succeeded in part because he was willing to fail, proposing and publishing many ideas that turned out to be wrong. That said, he was also brilliant. One Saturday morning, for example, he read an article describing the results of X-rays of a protein. By midday he had solved his structure, with the help of a visiting friend.

As I read, I was struck by the fact that Crick probably did not have the qualifications to become a scientist today. Today’s researchers will be surprised to discover that he did no formal teaching and wrote only one grant application. There may never be another Cricks, because we’ve created a system that doesn’t nurture his kind of genius.