PureGin.org

Francis Crick died on Wednesday, July 27, 2004 in La Jolla, California, of colon cancer. He was 88. The ramifications of his co-discovery of DNA appear still to be growing in depth and reach, over fifty years after the publication of this work. His fascination with science at the boundary between the living and the non-living turned in the past several decades to studying the relationship between the brain and the mind, a subject which may prove in time to have an even greater impact than his foundational work in molecular biology.

Crick, along with British chemist Rosalind Elsie Franklin, American biologist James Watson, and New Zealand-born British-educated physicist Maurice Wilkins are regarded as the principal discoverers of the physical structure, and method of replication, of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). In 1962, Crick, Watson and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discoveries.

Tragically, Rosalind Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958, before she could be fully recognized for her contributions to Science. It is not unlikely, given the nature of her work and laboratory conditions of the time, that she was exposed to sufficient radiation to trigger the cancer which claimed her life. Her important contributions to the elucidation of the structure of DNA, obtained through exceptionally precise experimental X-ray crystallography and scattering calculations, might be characterized as more rigorous and less reliant on "good guesses and intuition" than the work carried out by Crick, Watson, and Wilkins.

Crick and Watson continued their collaboration to propose a general theory of the structure of certain small viruses; work with Steve Brenner led to the formulation of the 'adaptor hypothesis' in the field of protein synthesis.

In recent years, Crick pursued research into the so-called neural correlates of consciousness, postulated causal links between physical phenomena in the brain and 'qualia' - states of conscious mind.

[1] Rosalind Franklin – The dark lady of DNA by Katrin Rittinger & Annalisa Pastore
[2] Francis Harry Compton Crick From Nobel Lectures, Physiology or Medicine 1942-1962, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1964