Nobel laureate Francis Crick, who half a century ago with James Watson made one of the seminal discoveries of modern science -- the double-helix structure of DNA -- died Wednesday in San Diego. He was 88.
Crick died at Thornton Hospital after a long battle with colon cancer. He remained actively involved in theoretical research until just before his death.
His 1953 discovery with Watson almost single-handedly launched the modern field of molecular genetics, with far-reaching implications for fathoming our biology as well as practical spin-offs ranging from genetic engineering to DNA fingerprinting.
Crick's later work was central to cracking the genetic code -- how stretches of DNA carry the instructions for all the structures of life.
Fascinated by the biology of the brain from an early age, Crick devoted the final portion of his life to tackling the science of consciousness, a mystery he described as "the major unsolved problem in biology."
Colleagues and friends remembered him as an endlessly curious man with a first-class intellect who never tired of discussing ideas and who had a keen homing instinct for the most important scientific mysteries of the day.
"He was the living incarnation of what it is to be a scholar: brilliant, rational, dispassionate and always willing to revise his own opinions and views in light of the actions of a universe that never ceased to astonish him," said Caltech professor Christof Koch, Crick's collaborator for many years. "He was editing a manuscript on his deathbed, a scientist until the bitter end."
An inveterate collaborator and gatherer of thinkers about him, Crick mused over the years on questions as varied as why people dream, where life came from and whether much of the DNA in our cells was parasitic junk.
"Until his death, Francis was the person with whom I could most easily talk about ideas," Watson, now chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y., said in a statement Thursday. "He will be sorely missed."
At the time of Crick and Watson's discovery, scientists were deeply mystified by the chemical nature of genes. They had only just begun to suspect that a long, stringy chemical known as deoxyribonucleic acid -- known for short as DNA -- might be the substance that genes were made of. And they did not know how such a code would work.
Crick and Watson were convinced that DNA was central to the mystery and so were drawn to each other. Their different scientific backgrounds and personalities were a perfect match.
"Without either one, it would not have happened," Renato Dulbecco, a Nobel laureate of medicine and distinguished professor of the Salk Institute, said Thursday.
The British-born Crick was 33 when, in 1949, he began studying at the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University for a PhD. Two years later, he met Watson, a young American scientist in his 20s, who was also doing research there.
The pair spent long hours discussing DNA's possible structure as they sat in the office they shared or strolled along the riverbanks.
Outspoken, loud-voiced and apt to interpret other people's data faster than they did themselves, Crick drew the ire of the Cavendish head, Nobel laureate Sir Lawrence Bragg. At one time, Bragg banned Crick and Watson from working on DNA at all. Another time -- after Crick brashly and publicly criticized the scientific methods of his superiors -- Bragg warned him: "Crick, you're rocking the boat."
Watson and Crick solved the DNA problem Feb. 28, 1953, building a chemical model based on X-ray images generated by researchers at King's College London. The pair arrived at their solution ahead of the London scientists -- Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin -- and Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling of Caltech.
Crick, according to Watson's popular 1968 book, "The Double Helix," was so elated the day of the discovery that he announced to the patrons of a local pub that the pair had just discovered "the secret of life."
Crick was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962 with Watson and Wilkins. Franklin, whose X-ray images of DNA were key to Watson and Crick's success, had died of ovarian cancer in 1958 and thus was not eligible for the award.
The ladder-like structure Crick and Watson discerned was of two long strings of sugars and phosphates, studded along their length with four chemicals known as bases. The two strands are coiled around each other like snakes and connected through the bases to form the ladder.
Watson and Crick's formal report on their discovery was published April 25, 1953, in the scientific journal Nature. It was just one page long -- but it was heavy with implications. It suggested how DNA could be faithfully copied and thus carried down from one generation to the next.
It also suggested how a simple chemical like DNA, which was made of only a few distinct chemical parts, could carry the code for assembling millions of different proteins that make up the structures of life.
