Crick Francis Harry Compton was one of two molecular biologists who unraveled the mystery of the structure of the genetic information carrier deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), thereby laying the foundation for modern molecular biology. After this fundamental discovery, he made significant contributions to the understanding of the genetic code and how genes work, as well as to neuroscience. Shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins for elucidating the structure of DNA.
Francis Crick: biography
The older of two sons, Francis, was born to Harry Crick and Elizabeth Ann Wilkins on June 8, 1916 in Northampton, England. He studied at the local gymnasium and at an early age became interested in experiments, often accompanied by chemical explosions. At school, he received a prize for picking wildflowers. In addition, he was obsessed with tennis, but did not have much interest in other games and sports. At the age of 14, Francis received a scholarship from Mill Hill School in north London. Four years later, at 18, he entered University College. By the time he comes of age, his parentsmoved from Northampton to Mill Hill, and this allowed Francis to live at home during his studies. He graduated with honors in physics.
After bachelor's degree, Francis Crick, under the supervision of da Costa Andrade, studied the viscosity of water under pressure and at high temperatures at University College. In 1940, Francis received a civilian position in the Admir alty, where he worked on the design of anti-ship mines. Early in the year, Crick married Ruth Doreen Dodd. Their son Michael was born during an air raid on London on 25 November 1940. By the end of the war, Francis was assigned to scientific intelligence at the headquarters of the British Admir alty in Whitehall, where he was developing weapons.
On the verge of living and nonliving
Realizing that he would need additional training to satisfy his desire to do basic research, Crick decided to work on his Ph. D. According to him, he was fascinated by two areas of biology - the border between living and non-living things and the activity of the brain. Crick chose the former, despite knowing little about the subject. After preliminary studies at University College in 1947, he settled on a program in a laboratory in Cambridge under Arthur Hughes to work on the physical properties of the cytoplasm of a chicken fibroblast culture.
Two years later, Crick joined the Medical Research Council team at the Cavendish Laboratory. It includes British academicsMax Perutz and John Kendrew (future Nobel laureates). Francis partnered with them ostensibly to study protein structure, but in reality to work with Watson to unravel the structure of DNA.
Double helix
In 1947, Francis Crick divorced Doreen and in 1949 married Odile Speed, an art student whom he met when she was in the Navy during his time in the Admir alty. Their marriage coincided with the start of his Ph. D. work in X-ray protein diffraction. This is a method of studying the crystal structure of molecules, allowing you to determine the elements of their three-dimensional structure.
In 1941 the Cavendish Laboratory was led by Sir William Lawrence Bragg, who had pioneered the X-ray diffraction technique forty years earlier. In 1951, Crick was joined by James Watson, a visiting American who had studied under the Italian physician Salvador Edward Luria and was a member of a group of physicists who studied bacterial viruses known as bacteriophages.
Like his colleagues, Watson was interested in unraveling the composition of genes and thought that unraveling the structure of DNA was the most promising solution. The informal partnership between Crick and Watson developed through similar ambitions and similar thought processes. Their experiences complemented each other. By the time they first met, Crick knew a lot about X-ray diffraction and protein structure, while Watson was very knowledgeable about bacteriophages and bacterial genetics.
Franklin Data
Francis Crick and James Watsonwere aware of the work of biochemists Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin of King's College London, who used X-ray diffraction to investigate the structure of DNA. Crick, in particular, urged the London group to build models similar to those made by Linus Pauling in the USA to solve the protein alpha helix problem. Pauling, the father of the chemical bond concept, showed that proteins have a three-dimensional structure and are not just linear chains of amino acids.
Wilkins and Franklin, acting independently, preferred a more deliberate experimental approach to the theoretical, modeling method of Pauling, which was followed by Francis. Since the group at King's College did not respond to their proposals, Crick and Watson devoted part of a two-year period to discussion and reasoning. In early 1953, they began building DNA models.
DNA structure
Using Franklin X-ray diffraction data, through much trial and error, they created a model of the deoxyribonucleic acid molecule that was consistent with the findings of the London group and the data of biochemist Erwin Chargaff. In 1950, the latter demonstrated that the relative number of four nucleotides that make up DNA follows certain rules, one of which was the correspondence of the amount of adenine (A) to the amount of thymine (T) and the amount of guanine (G) to the amount of cytosine (C). Such a relationship suggests the pairing of A and T and G and C, refuting the idea that DNA is nothing more than a tetranucleotide, that is, a simple molecule,consisting of all four bases.
During the spring and summer of 1953, Watson and Crick wrote four papers on the structure and putative functions of deoxyribonucleic acid, the first of which appeared April 25 in the journal Nature. The publications were accompanied by the work of Wilkins, Franklin and their colleagues, who provided experimental evidence for the model. Watson won the lot and put his name first, thus forever linking the fundamental scientific achievement with the Watson Creek couple.
Genetic code
Over the next few years, Francis Crick studied the relationship between DNA and the genetic code. His collaboration with Vernon Ingram led to the demonstration in 1956 of a difference in the hemoglobin composition of sickle cell anemia from normal by one amino acid. The study provided evidence that genetic diseases may be linked to the DNA-protein relationship.
Around the same time, South African geneticist and molecular biologist Sydney Brenner joined Crick at the Cavendish Laboratory. They began to deal with the "coding problem" - determining how the sequence of DNA bases forms the sequence of amino acids in a protein. The work was first presented in 1957 under the title "On Protein Synthesis". In it, Crick formulated the basic postulate of molecular biology, according to which information transmitted to a protein cannot be returned. He predicted the mechanism of protein synthesis by passing information from DNA to RNA and from RNA to protein.
InstituteSalk
In 1976, while on vacation, Crick was offered a permanent position at the Salk Institute for Biological Research in La Jolla, California. He agreed and worked at the Salk Institute for the rest of his life, including as director. Here Crick began to study the functioning of the brain, which interested him from the very beginning of his scientific career. He was mainly concerned with consciousness and tried to approach this problem through the study of vision. Crick published several speculative works on the mechanisms of dreams and attention, but, as he wrote in his autobiography, he had yet to come up with any theory that was both new and convincingly explained many experimental facts.
An interesting episode of activity at the Salk Institute was the development of his idea of \u200b\u200bdirected panspermia. Together with Leslie Orgel, he published a book in which he suggested that microbes hovered in outer space to eventually reach the Earth and seed it, and that this was done as a result of the actions of "someone." So Francis Crick disproved the theory of creationism by demonstrating how speculative ideas can be presented.
Scientist Awards
During his career as an energetic theorist of modern biology, Francis Crick collected, improved and synthesized the experimental work of others and brought his unusual findings to the solution of fundamental problems of science. His extraordinary efforts, in addition to the Nobel Prize, earned him many awards. These include premiumLasker, the Charles Mayer Prize of the French Academy of Sciences and the Copley Medal of the Royal Society. In 1991, he was inducted into the Order of Merit.
Creek died July 28, 2004 in San Diego at the age of 88. In 2016, the Francis Crick Institute was built in north London. The £660m building has become the largest biomedical research center in Europe.
