3 weeks ago
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Pat Sheil
February 4, 2026 — 4:00pm
BIOGRAPHY
Crick
Matthew Cobb
Profile Books, $65.00
Many reviews of Crick advise that Matthew Cobb’s fine biography may be “a challenge for the general reader”. Maybe so, but if you have to look up a word or two while revelling in this remarkable life of biologist and DNA pioneer Francis Crick, it’ll be worth it.
I had to rediscover notions I hadn’t dealt with since high school biology, and if you don’t know your chromosomes from your ribosomes, you won’t be alone, but Crick (subtitled A Mind in Motion) is a challenge well worth taking on.
Crick, and his many collaborators, made discoveries that have changed the lives of millions, but when they got started in the early 1950s, curing heritable diseases, tracing ancestors from DNA samples and catching criminals were the stuff of science fiction.
His name will always be linked with James Watson, his DNA collaborator and fellow Nobel laureate. In 1951, Crick and Watson unravelled the weird structure of the DNA molecule, showing it to be a double helix. Their first physical model, made of lab clamps and globular molecules, looked like a decorated spiral staircase.
DNA, we know now, carries much of the genetic information that makes us the creatures we are, and all manner of data determining how our children’s children might turn out.
Francis Crick was born in 1916, in Northampton, England, and as a child immersed himself in the peculiar Edwardian scientific notions to be found in The Children’s Encyclopaedia (including the racist eugenic archetypes that were par for the course between the world wars). He obtained his BSc in 1937, and like so many young boffins of his day, was seconded into war work, designing defences against German magnetic mines.
At war’s end he specialised in biology, and much of Cobb’s forensic detective work delves into how Crick became fascinated, even obsessed, with unravelling the molecular basis of genetics. There is much here about the intellectual jousting that was part of academic life in postwar England, and Cobb does a grand job of portraying this long-lost world, where exuberant personalities had far more clout than they do in the formalised strictures of modern universities. Crick wrote only one grant application in his life, and never taught a single undergraduate course.
He managed, over his long life (he died in 2004, while Watson, his younger collaborator, died last October, aged 97), to get away with offending and annoying many of the finest minds of his day, simply because he was particularly good at asking questions that nobody else seemed to know the answers to.
He was a man who might admit it when he was wrong, but this false modesty came with a surgical skill at puncturing the overblown balloons of other mighty intellects who, to his way of thinking, should have known better. He was scathing of brilliant mathematician Roger Penrose’s suggestion that human consciousness might be a weird harmonic of quantum uncertainty, and Cobb goes into some detail about Crick’s forays, after he’d moved to La Jolla in southern California in the 1980s, into this “problem of consciousness”.
In all matters cerebral, despite his fascination with theatre, avant-garde poetry and the visual arts, Crick remained a devout materialist throughout his life. He found no contradiction in his thinking being driven by wildly complex chemical reactions in his own skull, and indeed often made the point that all attempts at comprehending the origins and functions of consciousness are inevitably hindered by one brute fact: we are using our own imperfectly conscious brains to comprehend what it is. Or isn’t.
After much consideration (something Crick was very good at), he was pretty sure that the way we think the way we do could be understood. Nonetheless, he remained certain that the answers lay in molecular neurochemistry, not quantum physics, psychiatry or even the arts that he loved.
Back to the DNA structure discovery: Cobb corrects the oft-told allegation that Rosalind Franklin, the brilliant but reserved X-ray crystallographer who nailed one of the finest images of the double helix in 1951, was robbed of a Nobel by Crick and Watson, though Watson was certainly guilty of belittling her role in his self-serving 1968 book The Double Helix.
Franklin was a good friend of Crick and his artist wife, Odile, often staying with them in their house in London. They shared friendship and insights until her early death from cancer, aged 37. The so-called uncredited “Image 51” has become a feminist icon in the history of science, and for good reason, given the way women were treated in laboratories at the time. Yes, it was peeked at by another scientist involved in the work, and yes, it helped confirm the structure.
Franklin died in 1958, well before the 1962 DNA Nobel was awarded, and was credited at the time for her contribution. Nobels can’t be awarded posthumously, or amended.
But Franklin does live on. The European Space Agency’s Mars rover, to be launched in 2028 in search of molecular evidence of life, is fittingly named after her.
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