Renowned DNA Scientist Saw Life as It Is

Nobel laureate Francis Crick, who half a century ago with James Watson made one of the seminal discoveries of modern science -- the double-helix structure of DNA -- died Wednesday in San Diego. He was 88.

Crick died at Thornton Hospital after a long battle with colon cancer. He remained actively involved in theoretical research until just before his death.

His 1953 discovery with Watson almost single-handedly launched the modern field of molecular genetics, with far-reaching implications for fathoming our biology as well as practical spin-offs ranging from genetic engineering to DNA fingerprinting.

Crick’s later work was central to cracking the genetic code -- how stretches of DNA carry the instructions for all the structures of life.

Fascinated by the biology of the brain from an early age, Crick devoted the final portion of his life to tackling the science of consciousness, a mystery he described as “the major unsolved problem in biology.”

Colleagues and friends remembered him as an endlessly curious man with a first-class intellect who never tired of discussing ideas and who had a keen homing instinct for the most important scientific mysteries of the day.

“He was the living incarnation of what it is to be a scholar: brilliant, rational, dispassionate and always willing to revise his own opinions and views in light of the actions of a universe that never ceased to astonish him,” said Caltech professor Christof Koch, Crick’s collaborator for many years. “He was editing a manuscript on his deathbed, a scientist until the bitter end.”

An inveterate collaborator and gatherer of thinkers about him, Crick mused over the years on questions as varied as why people dream, where life came from and whether much of the DNA in our cells was parasitic junk.

“Until his death, Francis was the person with whom I could most easily talk about ideas,” Watson, now chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y., said in a statement Thursday. “He will be sorely missed.”

At the time of Crick and Watson’s discovery, scientists were deeply mystified by the chemical nature of genes. They had only just begun to suspect that a long, stringy chemical known as deoxyribonucleic acid -- known for short as DNA -- might be the substance that genes were made of. And they did not know how such a code would work.

Crick and Watson were convinced that DNA was central to the mystery and so were drawn to each other. Their different scientific backgrounds and personalities were a perfect match.

“Without either one, it would not have happened,” Renato Dulbecco, a Nobel laureate of medicine and distinguished professor of the Salk Institute, said Thursday.

The British-born Crick was 33 when, in 1949, he began studying at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University for a PhD. Two years later, he met Watson, a young American scientist in his 20s, who was also doing research there.

The pair spent long hours discussing DNA’s possible structure as they sat in the office they shared or strolled along the riverbanks.

Outspoken, loud-voiced and apt to interpret other people’s data faster than they did themselves, Crick drew the ire of the Cavendish head, Nobel laureate Sir Lawrence Bragg. At one time, Bragg banned Crick and Watson from working on DNA at all. Another time -- after Crick brashly and publicly criticized the scientific methods of his superiors -- Bragg warned him: “Crick, you’re rocking the boat.”

Watson and Crick solved the DNA problem Feb. 28, 1953, building a chemical model based on X-ray images generated by researchers at King’s College London. The pair arrived at their solution ahead of the London scientists -- Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin -- and Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling of Caltech.

Crick, according to Watson’s popular 1968 book, “The Double Helix,” was so elated the day of the discovery that he announced to the patrons of a local pub that the pair had just discovered “the secret of life.”

Crick was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962 with Watson and Wilkins. Franklin, whose X-ray images of DNA were key to Watson and Crick’s success, had died of ovarian cancer in 1958 and thus was not eligible for the award.

The ladder-like structure Crick and Watson discerned was of two long strings of sugars and phosphates, studded along their length with four chemicals known as bases. The two strands are coiled around each other like snakes and connected through the bases to form the ladder.

Watson and Crick’s formal report on their discovery was published April 25, 1953, in the scientific journal Nature. It was just one page long -- but it was heavy with implications. It suggested how DNA could be faithfully copied and thus carried down from one generation to the next.

It also suggested how a simple chemical like DNA, which was made of only a few distinct chemical parts, could carry the code for assembling millions of different proteins that make up the structures of life.

“It was a complete watershed -- the great change of the last century in biology,” said Crick’s colleague and friend, Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner of the Salk Institute, in an interview with The Times last year.

The finding turned genetics from a highly abstract science into one that was rooted in chemistry, said Nobel laureate David Baltimore, the president of Caltech.

At last, scientists could understand in concrete terms how inherited information was stored, copied and translated into proteins; how genes were damaged, causing diseases; how to alter them at will.

“It was the difference between having a blueprint and a functioning building,” Baltimore said Thursday. “A lot of geneticists had a very hard time understanding that ... but Crick understood it immediately.”

Crick played a pivotal role in later discoveries. He accurately predicted the existence of small chemicals known as “adaptors” that help assemble proteins, one amino acid at a time, from the instructions carried in genes. He made important discoveries about how genes are mutated by certain chemicals.

He also conducted experiments to show that the instructions for each amino acid in a protein were carried by three bases sitting next to each other in a gene. It was a pivotal step in cracking the genetic code.

Beyond these specific contributions, Crick -- a theoretician who rarely performed lab experiments -- has been credited by his colleagues with influencing and inspiring much of the thinking and experimentation in those early days of genetic discovery.

“No one man created molecular biology. But one man dominates intellectually the whole field, because he knows the most and understands the most: Francis Crick,” commented the late Jacques Monod, a French winner of the Nobel Prize.

Francis Harry Compton Crick was born June 8, 1916, near the city of Northampton, then center of the British shoe-manufacturing trade. Crick’s father, Harry, ran a shoe factory; the local soccer team was nicknamed “the Cobblers.”

As a child, Francis would pore over an encyclopedia and home in on the sections about the natural world. “What was the universe like? What were atoms? How did things grow? I absorbed great chunks of explanation, reveling in the unexpectedness of it all,” he wrote in his 1998 memoirs, “What Mad Pursuit.”

He attended school in Northampton, a boarding school in London, then University College London. He wrote that his early years revealed no special scientific flair: a few attic chemistry experiments, a mediocre physics degree awarded at the age of 21.

World War II came, and he worked in laboratories of the British Admiralty designing magnetic and acoustic mines.

After the war, he decided to pursue scientific research. To fix on an area of study he resorted to a strategy he termed “the gossip test” -- that the things you are truly interested in, you gossip about. Applying the test to himself, he realized that his main interests lay with the borderline between the living and nonliving -- the chemicals from which life springs -- and the workings of the brain.

His decision to investigate the former brought him enduring fame, but he returned, eventually, to the brain, and its mysteries would absorb him for the rest of his life.

By 1966 Crick had decided it was time to move from DNA to other scientific pastures. He devoted the remainder of his life to tackling another frontier: the biology of consciousness, a topic deemed by many philosophers to be outside the purview of scientific inquiry.

Crick was sure that all of the complexity of thought and awareness could ultimately be explained by the wiring and firing of nerves in the brain.

“ ‘You,’ your joys, and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules,” he wrote.

Working closely with Koch at Caltech, Crick began a search for the biological signs of consciousness in the brains of mammals.

Crick did not anticipate that there would be a solution in his lifetime. Unlike with DNA -- a problem considered ripe for cracking when he and Watson came together -- scientists cannot even agree on what consciousness is.

But Crick, said David Chalmers, a University of Arizona philosopher of consciousness, helped make consciousness science respectable.

In 1976, Crick took a one-year sabbatical at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla. He then decided to stay on permanently and for a time was president of the institute. Until his death he held the title of J.W. Kieckhefer distinguished research professor at the institute and was an adjunct professor of psychology at UC San Diego.

He never became an American citizen.

Crick wrote more than 130 scientific papers and several books, including his 1988 memoirs and a 1994 treatise on consciousness titled, “The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul.”

His most controversial offering, which he came to regret, was a popular book called “Life Itself,” co-written with Salk Institute colleague Leslie Orgel. The pair proposed that life on Earth might have been seeded by aliens via an unmanned spacecraft carrying microorganisms.

“It was a nutty idea,” Crick later said.

He and Watson drifted apart after the 1953 discovery; at times their relationship was frosty. Crick disliked Watson’s book “The Double Helix,” dismissing it as mean-spirited and gossipy. But by the time of Crick’s death, the pair had been on cordial terms for many years.

Much has been written about whether Franklin, who provided the key X-ray image that Crick and Watson used to crack the structure of DNA, was cheated of credit for her contribution. Crick never felt she had been treated unfairly. Had she had lived, he said, she would have won a Nobel as well. In any case, they were friends at the time of her death.

Crick avoided participating in 40- and 50-year anniversary celebrations of the discovery of DNA’s structure. He was known to send preprinted note cards in which he regretfully declined to “send an autograph,” “provide a photograph,” “cure your disease” or one of 13 other items listed.

But friends described him as an elegant and sociable man with a well-developed and kindly sense of fun. He enjoyed good conversation around a dinner table about anything -- art, philosophy, the history of science. Many scientists say that one of his greatest contributions was bringing top minds together to hash out ideas.

“Anybody could talk to him, and he could talk to anybody,” said Salk Institute professor Dulbecco.

By age 12, Crick had abandoned belief in God. To him, religious beliefs were stand-ins for the things that science had not yet explained, and through his life he instinctively was drawn to such areas of shadow. He never believed that explaining things would blot out their wonder.

“Just the opposite,” he said in an interview published in a British newspaper last year. “When you think of the way evolution makes things, the details with which even flowers are done, it’s absolutely extraordinary.”

Crick is survived by his wife, artist Odile Speed, to whom he had been married more than 50 years; two daughters, Gabrielle A. Crick and Jacqueline M-T Nichols, both of England; a son, Michael F.C. Crick of Seattle; and four grandchildren. Funeral arrangements have not been announced.

Times staff writer Charles Piller contributed to this report.