British molecular biologist, biophysicist and neuroscientist Francis Crick: biography, achievements, discoveries and interesting facts

Crick Francis Harry Compton was one of two molecular biologists who unraveled the mystery of the structure of the carrier of the genetic information of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), thereby laying the foundation for modern molecular biology. After this fundamental discovery, he made a significant contribution to understanding the genetic code and the work of genes, as well as in neurobiology. Divided the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1962 with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins for clarifying the structure of DNA.

Frances Creek: biography

The eldest of two sons, Francis, was born in the family of Harry Creek and Elizabeth Anne Wilkins on June 8, 1916 in Northampton, England. He studied at a local gymnasium and at an early age was carried away by experiments, often accompanied by chemical explosions. At school, he received a prize for the collection of wildflowers. In addition, he was obsessed with tennis, but not much interested in other games and sports. At the age of 14, Francis received a scholarship from the Mill Hill School in northern London. Four years later, at the age of 18, he entered a university college. By his majority, his parents had moved from Northampton to Mill Hill, and this allowed Francis to live at home while studying. He received a diploma with honors in physics.

After the undergraduate degree, Francis Crick, under the direction of Da Costa Andrade, at the University College, was engaged in studies of the viscosity of water under pressure and at high temperatures. In 1940, Francis received a civilian position at the Admiralty, where he worked on the design of anti-ship mines. At the beginning of the year, Creek married Ruth Dorin Dodd. Their son Michael was born during an air raid on London on November 25, 1940. By the end of the war, Francis was assigned to scientific intelligence at the headquarters of the British Admiralty in Whitehall, where he worked on the development of weapons.

On the verge of a living and nonliving

Realizing that he will need additional training to satisfy his desire to engage in basic research, Creek decided to work on an academic degree. According to him, he was fascinated by two areas of biology - the boundary between the living and non-living and the brain. Scream chose the first, despite the fact that he knew little about the subject. After preliminary research at the University College in 1947, he settled on a program at a laboratory in Cambridge under the guidance of Arthur Hughes, concerning the work on the physical properties of the cytoplasm of a culture of chicken fibroblasts.

Two years later, Creek joined the group of the Medical Research Council at the Cavendish Laboratory. It included British academics Max Perutz and John Kendryu (future Nobel laureates). Frances began to cooperate with them allegedly to study the structure of the protein, but in fact to work with Watson on the solution of the DNA structure.

Double helix

In 1947, Francis Crick divorced Doreen and in 1949 he married Odile Speed, a student-artist, whom he met when she served in the Navy during his service at the Admiralty. Their marriage coincided with the beginning of his Ph.D. work on X-ray diffractometry of proteins. This is a method for studying the crystal structure of molecules, which makes it possible to determine the elements of their three-dimensional structure.

In 1941, the Cavendish Laboratory was led by Sir William Lawrence Bragg, who was the pioneer of the X-ray diffraction method forty years ago. In 1951, James Watson, an invited American who studied with the Italian physician Salvador Edward Luria, joined James and was a member of a group of physicists who studied bacterial viruses known as bacteriophages.

Like his colleagues, Watson was interested in disclosing the composition of the genes and thought that the solution of the DNA structure was the most promising solution. Informal partnership between Scream and Watson developed due to similar ambitions and similar thought processes. Their experience complemented each other. By the time of their first meeting, Creek knew a lot about x-ray diffraction and protein structure, and Watson was well aware of bacteriophages and bacterial genetics.

Data Franklin

Frances Creek and James Watson were aware of the work of biochemists Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin of King's College, London, who examined the structure of DNA using X-ray diffraction. Creek, in particular, urged the London group to build models similar to those that Linus Pauling did in the US to solve the problem of the alpha helix protein. Pauling, the father of the concept of chemical bonding, has shown that proteins have a three-dimensional structure and are not just linear chains of amino acids.

Wilkins and Franklin, acting independently, preferred a more conscious experimental approach to the theoretical, modeling Pauling method, which Frances held. Since the group at King's College did not react to their proposals, Crick and Watson devoted part of the two-year period to discussions and reasoning. In early 1953, they began to build DNA models.

Structure of DNA

Using Franklin X-ray diffraction data, they created a model of the deoxyribonucleic acid molecule by a lot of trial and error, which was consistent with the conclusions of the London group and the data of the biochemist Erwin Chargaff. In 1950, the latter demonstrated that the relative number of four nucleotides that make up DNA follows certain rules, one of which was the correspondence of the amount of adenine (A) to the amount of thymine (T) and the amount of guanine (G) to the amount of cytosine (C). Such a link assumes pairing A and T and G and C, refuting the idea that DNA is nothing more than a tetranucleotide, that is, a simple molecule consisting of all four bases.

In the spring and summer of 1953, Watson and Crick wrote four articles on the structure and putative functions of deoxyribonucleic acid, the first of which appeared on April 25 in the journal Nature. Publications were accompanied by the work of Wilkins, Franklin and their colleagues, who presented experimental proofs of the model. Watson won the lot and put his name first, thus forever linking the fundamental scientific achievement with the Watson Creek pair.

Genetic code

Over the next few years, Francis Crick studied the relationship between DNA and the genetic code. His collaboration with Vernon Ingram led to a demonstration in 1956 of a difference in the composition of hemoglobin of sickle-cell anemia from normal to one amino acid. The study provided evidence that genetic diseases may be related to the ratio of DNA-protein.

Around the same time, a geneticist and molecular biologist from South Africa Sidney Brenner joined Cric in the Cavendish Laboratory. They began to deal with the "coding problem" - by determining how the sequence of DNA bases forms a sequence of amino acids in the protein. The work was first introduced in 1957 under the title "On the synthesis of protein." In it, Creek formulated the basic postulate of molecular biology, according to which information transferred to a protein can not be returned. He predicted a mechanism for protein synthesis by transferring information from DNA to RNA and from RNA to protein.

Salk Institute

In 1976, while on holiday, Crick was offered a permanent position at the Salk Institute for Biological Research in La Hoya, California. He agreed and spent the rest of his life working at the Salk Institute, including as a director. Here Scream began to study the functioning of the brain, which interested him from the very beginning of his scientific career. Basically, he was engaged in consciousness and tried to approach this problem through the study of vision. Creek published several speculative works on the mechanisms of dreams and attention, but, as he wrote in his autobiography, he still had to produce a theory that would simultaneously be new and convincingly explain many experimental facts.

An interesting episode of activity at the Salk Institute was the development of his idea of "directed panspermia." Together with Leslie Orgel, he published a book in which he suggested that the microbes were hovering in outer space to eventually reach the Earth and sow it, and that this was done as a result of the actions of "someone". So Francis Crick refuted the theory of creationism, demonstrating how one can imagine speculative ideas.

Awards of the scientist

During his career as an energetic theorist of modern biology, Francis Crick collected, improved and synthesized the experimental work of others and brought his unusual conclusions to solve the fundamental problems of science. His extraordinary efforts, in addition to the Nobel Prize, brought him many awards. These include the Lasker Prize, the Charles Mayer French Academy of Sciences Prize and the Copley Royal Society Medal. In 1991 he was admitted to the Order of Merit.

Creek died on July 28, 2004 in San Diego at the age of 88. In 2016, in the north of London, the Francis Crick Institute was built. The £ 660 million building became the largest center for biomedical research in Europe.