Cry Francis Harry Compton was one of two molecular biologists who unraveled the mystery of the structure of the carrier of genetic information 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 to neurobiology. He shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins for elucidating the structure of DNA.
Francis Creek: biography
The eldest of two sons, Francis, was born to Harry Crick and Elizabeth Ann Wilkins on June 8, 1916 in Northampton, England. He studied at a local gymnasium and at an early age became interested in experiments, often accompanied by chemical explosions. At school, he received a prize for collecting wildflowers. In addition, he was obsessed with tennis, but was not very interested in other games and sports. At the age of 14, Francis received a scholarship to the Mill Hill School in north London. Four years later, at 18, he entered university college. By his coming of age, his parents 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 undergraduate, Francis Crick, under the leadership of da Costa Andrade, at the University College was engaged in research of the viscosity of water under pressure and at high temperatures. In 1940, Francis received a civilian post in the Admiralty, where he worked on the design of anti-ship mines. Earlier this year, Scream married Ruth Dorin Dodd. Their son Michael was born during an air raid on London on November 25, 1940. Towards the end of the war, Francis was assigned to scientific intelligence at the headquarters of the British Admiralty in Whitehall, where he was engaged in the development of weapons.
On the verge of living and nonliving
Realizing that he would need additional training in order to satisfy his desire to do basic research, Crick decided to work on a degree. According to him, he was fascinated by two areas of biology - the boundary between living and nonliving and brain activity. Scream chose the first, despite the fact that he knew little about the subject. After preliminary studies at university college in 1947, he settled on a program in a laboratory in Cambridge under the direction of Arthur Hughes, concerning work on the physical properties of the cytoplasm of chicken fibroblast culture.
Two years later, Crick joined the Medical Research Council at the Cavendish Laboratory. It included British academics Max Perutz and John Kendrew (future Nobel laureates). Francis began to collaborate with them ostensibly to study the structure of the protein, but in reality to work with Watson to unravel the structure of DNA.
Double helix
In 1947, Francis Crick divorced Doreen and in 1949 married Odile Speed, a student artist, whom he met when she served in the Navy during his service in 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 allows to determine the elements of their three-dimensional structure.
In 1941, the Cavendish Laboratory was run by Sir William Lawrence Bragg, who pioneered the X-ray diffraction method forty years ago. In 1951, James Watson, a visiting American who studied under the Italian physician Salvador Edward Luria and was a member of a group of physicists who studied bacterial viruses known as bacteriophages, joined Crick.
Like his colleagues, Watson was interested in revealing the composition of genes and thought that unraveling the structure of DNA was the most promising solution. The informal partnership between Crick and Watson developed through similar ambitions and similar thought processes. Their experience complemented each other. By the time they first met, Crick knew a lot about X-ray diffraction and protein structure, and Watson was well aware of bacteriophages and bacterial genetics.
Franklin data
Francis Crick and James Watson were aware of the work of biochemists Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin of King's College London, who studied the structure of DNA using X-ray diffraction. Crick, in particular, called on the London group to build models similar to those made by Linus Pauling in the USA to solve the protein alpha helix problem. Pauling, the father of the chemical bonding concept, showed that proteins have a three-dimensional structure and are not just linear chains of amino acids.
Wilkins and Franklin, acting independently, preferred a more informed experimental approach to Pauling's theoretical, modeling method, followed by Francis. Since the group at King's College did not respond to their suggestions, Crick and Watson devoted part of the biennium to discussions and reasoning. In early 1953, they began to build DNA models.
DNA structure
Using Franklin X-ray diffraction data, using many trial and error methods, they created a model of the deoxyribonucleic acid molecule, 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 is 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 relationship implies the pairing of 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. The publications were accompanied by the work of Wilkins, Franklin and their colleagues, who presented experimental evidence for the model. Watson won the draw and put his surname 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 the difference between the hemoglobin composition of sickle cell anemia from normal by one amino acid. The study provided evidence that genetic diseases could be related to the DNA-protein ratio.
Around the same time, Sydney Brenner, a geneticist and molecular biologist from South Africa, joined Creek in the Cavendish Laboratory. They began to tackle the “coding problem” —determining how the DNA base sequence forms the amino acid sequence in a protein. The work was first presented in 1957 under the title "On Protein Synthesis". In it, Crick formulated the basic postulate of molecular biology, according to which, the information transmitted to the protein can no longer be returned. He predicted the mechanism of protein synthesis by transferring information from DNA to RNA and from RNA to protein.
Salk Institute
During a vacation in 1976, Crick was offered a permanent position at the Salk Institute for Biological Research in La Hoya, California. He agreed and for the rest of his life worked at the Salk Institute, including as a director. Here, Crick began to study the functioning of the brain, which had interested him from the very beginning of his scientific career. He was mainly concerned with consciousness and tried to approach this problem through the study of vision. Crick published several speculative works on the mechanisms of dreams and attention, but, as he wrote in his autobiography, he still had to bring to light some theory that would 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 microbes hovered in outer space in order 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, showing how speculative ideas could be presented.
Scientist Awards
During his career as an energetic theoretician 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, earned him many awards. These include the Lasker Prize, the Charles Mayer Prize of the French Academy of Sciences, and the Copley Royal Society Medal. In 1991, he was admitted to the Order of Merit.
Scream died on July 28, 2004 in San Diego at the age of 88. In 2016, the Francis Crick Institute was built in the north of London. The 660 million pound building has become Europe's largest center for biomedical research.