Who is Francis Crick?

Who is Francis Crick? Francis Crick was probably one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century. Well, you know about DNA, right? If you don't, DNA certainly knows about you. It's the name given to the molecule that carries the genetic instructions that determine how every living organism will look and function, including you. It looks like this. The famous double helix. Looks like a tangle of thread. We know it looks like this because it's Francis Crick. But let's start at the beginning. Francis Harry Compton Crick spent his youth studying physics so far and so not really to do with DNA. But ever the interdisciplinary scientist, he moved into biology, upping sticks to Cambridge around the same time as a young American scientist called James Watson. More on him in a sec. Crick was inspired by a question posed by Erwin Schrödinger. The cat-in-the-box guy. Schrödinger asked, how can the events of space and time which take place within the living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry? Watson and Crick agreed that unlocking the structure of DNA would provide the answer. And the pair embarked on a quest to solve this biological mystery, building on the discoveries of scientists including Rosalind Franklin, who captured the very first defining image of DNA. Which brings us back to the double helix. Disputed legend has it that on the 28th February 1953, Francis Crick burst into his local pub, The Eagle, in Cambridge and declared that he'd found the secret of life. Using Rosalind Franklin's X-ray images, Watson and Crick had constructed a model of DNA. They reckoned that if the two strands split from one another, each strand would provide a template for the formation of two new identical strands. This theory and subsequent research led to an explanation of how genetic information is inherited from generation to generation, which in turn helps explain why we are how we are. Crick bagged a Nobel Prize and spent the following decades finding out more and more about DNA and how to read the genetic code, studying the brain and writing several exciting books. In 2004, Francis Crick died. But his findings mean he'll always be a part of all of our DNA in a way. And now he has one of the world's leading research centres named after him. The Francis Crick Institute.