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Death of the Genius Who Discovered the Secret of Life

Posted on: Friday, 30 July 2004, 06:00 CDT

THE most earth-shattering scientific revolution of the 20th Century began with perhaps the greatest ever exercise in understatement.

'We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA),' the two authors of the groundbreaking work announced in the journal Nature.

'This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.' In those two arcane sentences were contained the basis of the whole Brave New World genetics, cloning, GM technology and the rest.

One of the authors was a young Englishman called Francis Crick and in the spring of 1953, what he and his colleague James Watson had discovered was the key to life itself.

Thanks to him, we live in a world of forensic genetics, DNA fingerprinting, designer babies and paternity-testing.

With the announcement yesterday of Professor Crick's death at the age of 88, after a long battle with cancer, the world has lost one of its geniuses.

He was one of those rare, great Englishmen, like Charles Darwin, who change the way we perceive the world.

Born in 1916 in Northamptonshire, Crick was fascinated by chemistry as a boy, and alarmed his parents by trying to develop new artificial materials in his bedroom and the kitchen often with explosive results.

He spent World War II working on the development and detection of mines and torpedoes.

In 1947, Crick took up a post at Cambridge, working at the Cavendish Laboratory where he became friends with 23-year-old Watson. The two men worked long into the night on a problem that had been at the heart of biology for more than a century.

Scientists knew that there had to be some mechanism by which certain characteristics could be transferred from parent to off- spring down the generations hair and eye colour, height and build for example, as well as IQ and sexuality.

These 'particles' of inheritance were named genes but no one knew what they actually were.

By the 1930s, biologists had some good candidates. Genes had to be made of complex chemicals present in every animal, plant and microbe and so proteins were an early contender.

They are large molecules composed of thousands of atoms certainly complicated enough to be the home of the genetic code, the collection of the thousands of genes needed to build our bodies.

Another candidate were nucleic acids. These chemicals were complex and present in nearly all cells of living organisms.

By 1950, biologists had concluded that the genetic code was indeed contained in these strange molecules but had no clue how it was constructed.

Crick and Watson turned their attention to one nucleic acid in particular, DNA.

Using X-ray images of the molecule, they discovered that it was made of two spirals of atoms, intertwined as a double-helix. By deducing its structure and establishing that genes were simply sections of the DNA molecule they were able to establish how certain characteristics are passed down the generations.

In simple terms, during fertilisation the DNA in human eggs and sperm cells 'unzips' down its double helix length allowing the mixing of genes from male and female and the inheritance of characteristics across generations.

In 1962 Crick, Watson and their colleague Maurice Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for discovering the 'molecule of life'.

Crick, who married twice and had three children, spent the rest of his professional life working out the relationship between the genetic code and proteins the building blocks of our bodies.

In 1976 he moved to California, focusing in later years on the workings of the brain.

Brilliant as he was, Crick was sometimes controversial. In the 1980s he suggested that life on Earth may have been started deliberately by an alien civilisation.

In recent years, he and Watson have also been accused of downplaying the contribution of their co-researcher Rosalind Franklin, who had performed much of the pioneering work with X-rays and DNA. Nevertheless, the key insight the double helix was entirely theirs.

Crick's legacy consists of some of the greatest opportunities and greatest fears of the modern world. For better or worse, genetic science has changed the way we think about our bodies and about our behaviour.

When he finally had his eureka moment in February 1953, Crick burst into the Eagle Pub in Cambridge announcing that he and Watson 'had found the secret of life'. Indeed, he had.

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