Customer Reviews

Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code (Eminent Lives) (rough edge)

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Matt Ridley has captured much of Francis Crick's essence in a very short, credible, engaging book. He has captured Crick's contributions to the discovery of DNA, but he also resurrects Crick's equally great contributions to understanding DNA's coding scheme. He has, I believe, portrayed the essence of Crick's thinking style - Crick's superb ability to visualize details in three-dimensional space; his life-long need to talk and debate with close colleagues; his intellectual pragmatism, his diligent reading abilities, his playfulness, and his ability to focus for long periods. Ridley has captured Crick's many moments of being polite, spirited, friendly, accommodating, and curious. But Ridley has also captured the stronger aspects of Crick's personality. These include his ability to take strong stands against things he despised, such as vitalism, royalty, and` organized religion. At times, these strong stands could be courageous and insightful. At others, Crick's behaviors could seem downright stubborn, cold and mean. A vitriolic attack on the Richard Gregory comes to mind, and is described in the later pages of the book. Another remarkable aspect of the book is its treatment of the mundane and perhaps "mediocre" Crick. The portrait of Crick and his work in WWII is fascinating for this reason, and invites considerable speculation.

Ridley weighs in on the well-known, controversial, mysterious and misunderstood aspects of the discovery of DNA. He includes sane descriptions and analyses of Crick's storied colleagues -Watson, Wilkins, Franklin, Brenner, Orgel, and many others. Ridley's treatment of Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins, Pauling, Chargaff and others involved in the controversial steps toward the discovery of DNA is well worth a look. "The story of the double helix is awash with might-have beens. Every participant had cause for regret about a blunder made or an opportunity missed." We see that Rosalind Franklin's interactions with Crick and others were mysterious and complex. Despite any hard feelings, we see Crick and his wife befriend Franklin toward the end of her life. But we also see Crick respond to controversy by harshly describing Franklin as "not sound." We see Wilkins as a somewhat unfortunate figure, despite his Nobel Prize. He is remembered, in part, as the man who did not collaborate sanely with Franklin; who failed to build models in a timely manner; who stole Franklin's data.

As I write this review, the book has been on the market for about a week, and Matt Ridley has just presented talks on his book at UCSD and at the Salk Institute. These talks, moderated by Roger Bingham and Stuart Anstis, were taped and will be published in some form soon. If you have a strong interest in Crick and his story, then it will be well worth watching these talks and the discussions that followed. They were riveting. The rooms were filled with many people who knew Crick well, and their questions and comments made for a vibrant and important presentation.

A number of other materials enhanced my enjoyment of this book, and I recommend them. Start with Francis Crick's (1988) "What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery." Have a copy of this book nearby while reading Ridley's book. This is Crick's autobiography, and it provides strong insights into Crick, his discoveries, his colleagues, and his times. In one intriguing passage, Crick commented on a movie drama about the discovery of DNA, and I couldn't help but thinking about it as I read this biography. Moreover, the autobiography contains many relevant photographs, including some that appeared in Ridley's talks in San Diego. One of the things I like about Crick's book is that it provides some details about his friendship with VS Ramachandran, co-founder of "the Helmholtz Club." Ramachandran is a great thinker and genius in his own right, and the two had many important interactions. Crick discussed how he was influenced by great vision scientists such as Hubel and Wiesel, among others. I would also recommend the introduction to "The Astonishing Hypothesis," in which Crick discloses more about himself and his ways. And of course, it helps to consult copies of Watson's books, Perutz' book on science and scientists, and books about Franklin, Wilkins and others.

I hope that Ridley makes some of his visual materials available, as the book contains no pictures. Moreover, it is a shame that the book does not provide an index. A book like this needs an index because on often times wants to find specific passages, topics or people within the book.

(On a personal note--I should say that I interacted briefly with Crick perhaps 20 times at talks and parties over perhaps a 7 year period, and did not know him particularly well. Even so, I felt like I had a somewhat reasonable sense of him. I caught first-hand glimpses of his kindness, enthusiasm and cantakerousness. He attended a talk I gave in 1997 at the Salk Institute, and I knew of him mostly through reports by mutual friends and colleagues. Their enthusiasm for Crick spoke volumes. My strongest memories are of Crick holding court at one of the many parties at Stuart Anstis' house, often kindly answering UCSD students' questions in an entertaining way. His last appearance at one of these parties was just a few months before he died. I went to the large memorial for him at the Salk Institute.)

Although Ridley has added another person's view regarding DNA and Crick, I think it is fair to say that this bio is "not the final word" and "the book is not out" in some sense. There are quite a few versions of Crick and the DNA story. I look forward to Ridley's version being picked over by people who are more knowledgeable than I. It is certainly possible to supplement ones understanding using other sources. One that comes highly recommended to me by a friend of Crick is "The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology." The word is that Crick figures predominantly in this book, and that the book provides a reasonably accurate portrayal. Another source is Olby's "The Path to the Double Helix." Again, I'm not familiar with the book, so won't comment. Perhaps the ultimate source on Crick will appear in 2007. Martin Packer reports that Crick's full-length scientific biography (by Olby) will appear then, and he is currently soliciting material for the book.

I wonder how Crick would react to all this posthumous attention. This is the man who wanted attention placed on the molecules, not the scientists who studied them. How ironic that his desire to remain somewhat anonymous has led to all this. Crick IS fascinating, whether he liked it or not.

I bought this book mainly to find out how the discovery of the workings of DNA was carried out. But it is also a biography of Crick and Ridley portrays Crick the person well, so much so that I was very sad when I got to the part about Crick's death.

Watson had previously told the story of the discovery of the DNA structure in his book The Double Helix, but in his version, he tried to present the events as he saw them when he was living through them. Ridley gives a more objective picture and he also has a lot of information that Watson had to omit because he didn't know it at the time. Ridley's is far better as science history; Watson's is a helluva lot better story.

Watson and Crick approached the question of DNA structure with different motives. As Watson tells it - and his story rings true in this regard - he was a young, unknown scientist looking for a project that would establish him as more than just a bright post-doc. Crick, a militant atheist, wanted to show that there was some important aspect of life that could be explained without resorting to the hypothesis of God. (Numerous people had already done this; Crick wanted to extend the work in some significant way.) DNA was perfect for both men. Significantly, it was Crick who insisted on including a line in the original letter to Nature saying that the structure suggested a method for replication.

With the double helix nailed down, Watson could say "Mission Accomplished" and devote some energy to his next major project: looking for a wife. (That's how he tells it in the sequel.) For Crick however, the job had barely begun. To make his point, he had to show how DNA did its job, using only the laws of chemistry. He dedicated much of the rest of his life to this task and, as Ridley tells it, he was a major inspiration to others in the field.

Most of the things that were discovered in this period were familiar to me, as they are to most people who are interested in modern biology. But the story of how the facts were worked out had some surprises. For example, it seemed obvious to me, looking backward, that the code should be a sequence of triplets with no overlap. But Crick tried other, cleverer, schemes before he settled on this one. I need to be reminded from time to time that discovery can be quirky.

Later in his life, Crick tackled the problem of trying to explain consciousness. As Ridley tells it, Crick met a lot of resistance to his idea that scientists should try to find connections between experiences and brain activities. This doesn't ring true to me since I know that scientists in the 1950s were already mapping particular brain locations to particular memories and actions. I suspect that some people were resistant to the idea and that others were way ahead of Crick.

While I'm sure that Crick's work has never changed a single mind about the existence of God, it is certainly important for our understanding of hereditary diseases, cancer, evolution, and other subjects.

When I review a science book, I try to give an idea of the technical level. This one is appropriate for readers with little awareness of science. It helps to know what RNA is, but it's probably not necessary.

For readers who would like to learn more about how DNA works, there is a very detailed, and very technical, account by Watson, et al. called Molecular Biology of the Gene. You may click on "See all my reviews" and go to page 3 for my review.

I was heartened to read in this book that Francis Crick steadfastly refused to accept honorary degrees and other such dubious signs of distinction that academics like to bestow on one another. Of course Crick received the Nobel prize, so it was easy for him to snub his nose at the honor-grubbing of his lesser colleagues. Still, his behavior in this area is exemplary, and reassuring.

While I got this glimpse of Crick's personality, I did not learn as much as I had hoped about DNA. That is due to my faulty background in science at least as much as to any fault in Ridley's prose. But Ridley did inspire me to get back to Watson's "Double Helix," and eventually, I hope, I will arrive at more of an insight into the intellectual revolution that was brought about by Crick and Watson.

As others have noted, the book - so full of names and places - cries out for photographs. There are none. And it cries out for an index, of which there is none. Please, Atlas Books, relax your purse strings a bit and provide such things for the second edition.

It has been many years since I learned the basics of DNA, RNA, and protein synthesis. This book was a wonderful, short review of the material. I particularly enjoyed reading about the early educational history of Crick. If you have any interest in modern molecular biology, I believe you will enjoy reading this brief biography of the man present at the conception.

If anything typified Francis Crick's work style, it was his quest for cooperation. The "Watson-Crick" team has so dominated the literature of DNA research, that a view of Crick as an individual is a rare sight. Matt Ridley has admirably filled in that lack with this view of the Nobel Laureate's life. In a brief, but insightful, and superbly written account, the biographer has filled in many details of a scientist, a theoriser and, most significantly, a man of unquenchable curiosity.

If any one term can typify Crick's personality, it was his outgoing nature. One of the more famous sentences in science writing is Jim Watson's announcement that he'd never seen Crick in "a modest mood". Although the remark irritated Crick, it did summarise many aspects of his nature in both work and personal relationships. Crick was immensely curious about nearly everything, and once he'd tackled a problem stayed doggingly with it. He was dismissive of "fuzzy logic", demanding much from his associates and co-workers - and demanding it constantly. As Ridley frequently points out, while this may have irritated many, the results were rewarding. Ridley subtitles the book "The Discoverer of the Genetic Code" due to Crick's persistance, even "bootlegging" time to accomplish the joint find through a model Crick built. Crick later went on to work on the "purpose" of DNA and its relation to protein production, something fundamental to life.

Ridley traces Crick's early life and his career during WWII. He was a late arrival in academia, standing out among his fellows both in physical stature and age. He enjoyed the banter with professors and fellow students, although his braying laugh left some disaffected. The proper people perceived the strength of his mind, however, and encouraged his pursuits, although sometimes on a short leash. Some of that outgoing nature likely brought about his first marriage, and just as likely was the cause of its later dissolution. It certainly led to his second wife, Odile, but this time cemented the match for decades.

Crick's noteriety derived from the DNA discovery brought numerous offers for positions, but it was the British Internal Revenue policies that led him to the United States. There, he launched many new investigations. Among these was life's origins, a topic that had long fascinated him. Crick had difficulty with the notion that life simply emerged from chemical reactions. He suggested that life on Earth had been "seeded" in bacterial form by distant alien civilisations intent on preserving their genetic formulas. A later collaboration with Christof Koch resulted in "The Astonishing Hypothesis", a work on human consciousness.

Ridley spends a chapter on "the book"; James Watson's highly personalised account of the DNA discovery. It was an irritant to Crick, not only because he was dealt with frankly by "Honest Jim" [which was the book's original title!], but because while Crick may have been informal in his lifestyle, he considered anything "frivolous" dealing with science was inappropriate. Watson's final publication, "The Double Helix" was a smash hit, prompting other scientists to explain their work in personal terms. What Watson did for himself was left for Ridley to produce for Francis Crick. Both men were giants in many ways, and Ridley elevates Crick to the heights generally reserved for names like Galileo or Darwin. The assessment is neither misplaced or overblown. Francis Crick will be difficult to replace. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Discovery of the secret of the gene (and `life' according to Crick) is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating episodes of the history of science! Within less than a decade the efforts of a handful of young scientists reduces one of the greatest and most ambiguous paradigms of life-sciences - GENE - into a simple, elegant and intuitive scheme called the Double Helix (James Watson)! In his book `Francis Crick: Discoverer of the genetic code' Matt Ridley did an excellent job in making accessible and comprehensible the race for the double helix and code of the life in one! A tremendous amount of home work has been done by the author in getting into the heart of the vortex, to its very eye - the genius of Francis Crick. With Crick's astonishing ant's instinct for the world of tiny and an ability for seeing order in the small, the story culminates in one of the greatest discovery in life-sciences of all times - the structure of the DNA. No long and boring pages in the book! No insignificant episodes! No strangers! All is important and everyone has its critical mass and saying. Even the `useless scientific papers' contain hints towards the big discovery (according to Crick and good news for the most of scientists). The book is earthy, interesting and realistic (one of the main strength of this story as well as James Watson's `Double Helix') with real players guided by emotions, intuitions and by cold reason of calculation. A vivid and insightful life account of the twentieth century most important biologist.

+++++

This book, by professor and author Matt Ridley, succinctly tells the life story of Dr. Francis Crick (1916 to 2004), perhaps best known for discovering, along with Dr. James Watson, the structure of DNA. (Ridley tells us that "I first met Francis Crick through my wife [a professor], who worked with him in 1985.")

Roughly, this book can be divided into five parts:

(1) Crick's early years
(2) His discovery, along with Watson, of the double helical structure of DNA
(3) Crick's discovery of the genetic code ("as great an achievement as the double helix")
(4) His interesting life after the double helix and the genetic code
(5) Crick's work in neuroscience and human consciousness

Besides Ridley's generally easy to read narrative, there are also included actual parts of letters and quotations by Crick and other influential others of that time. Ridley did not only rely only on other written sources to create his interesting and illuminating main narrative but also relied on interviews with Crick's second wife and his grown children.

As I was reading this book, I came across surprisingly many things I did not know. (I say surprisingly because I have read quite a bit on the discovery of DNA's structure but admit that I knew very little about Francis Crick the man.) As I was reading this book, I got the impression that Crick was quite a remarkable person. This impression lasted until I read the last few pages of chapter ten.

Ridley could have not written these last few pages and only written that Crick was extraordinary in every way. But he chose not too instead giving us details of some of Crick's bizarre beliefs. (Some of these beliefs may get some readers upset.)

Finally, I had only one major problem with this book--it lacks illustrations. There is a photograph on the book's cover (displayed above by Amazon), a frontispiece famous photograph, a line diagram, and a chart or table. That's it!! I understand that Ridley was trying to keep his book brief but a few more illustrations especially when he started talking about DNA, transfer RNA, messenger RNA, etc. would have been helpful as well as instructive.

A minor problem is that this book has no index. True the book is brief but this is deceiving since Ridley packs a lot into each page. Thus, while an index is not absolutely needed, it would have been helpful.

In conclusion, this is an amazing book that presents the fascinating biography of the twentieth century's most important biologist!!!

(first published 2006; prologue; 13 chapters; epilogue; main narrative 210 pages; sources and acknowledgements)

+++++

This is a wonderful biography, full of telling details and written by an author who knew Crick personally. Provides the best account to date of the sequence of events and thinking that led to fundamental understanding of molecular genetics.

I'm still reading this book, short as it is. However, if you are interested in the origin of ideas and how scientists think you will find this a fascinating story. Along the way you will learn about some of the most fudamental discoveries in the 20th century.

While the author got Crick's name right, he dropped the ball on the rest of the title. Crick did not discover the genetic code. Marshall Nirenberg did. Crick and Watson figured out the structure of the DNA molecule. There is a difference between elucidating the structure of DNA and working out the code embodied in that structure. Hopefully the author makes the distinction in the text. I have not read the book. This is just a review of the title, which gets a "2", on the strength of spelling Crick's name right.