Francis Crick
Francis Crick
Francis Harry Compton Crick OM FRSwas a British molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist, most noted for being a co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953 with James Watson. Together with Watson and Maurice Wilkins, he was jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material"...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth8 June 1916
Francis Crick quotes about
thinking arrogance ruthlessness
Jim and I hit it off immediately, partly because our interests were astonishingly similar and partly, I suspect, because a certain youthful arrogance, a ruthlessness, an impatience with sloppy thinking can naturally to both of us.
thinking class simplicity
For simplicity one can think of the + class as having one extra base at some point or other in the genetic message and the - class as having one too few.
thinking discovery views
The major credit I think Jim and I deserve ... is for selecting the right problem and sticking to it. It's true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold, but the fact remains that we were looking for gold. Both of us had decided, quite independently of each other, that the central problem in molecular biology was the chemical structure of the gene. ... We could not see what the answer was, but we considered it so important that we were determined to think about it long and hard, from any relevant point of view.
thinking average class
I think she [Rosalind Franklin] was a good experimentalist but certainly not of the first rank. She was simply not in the same class as Eigen or Bragg or Pauling, nor was she as good as Dorothy Hodgkin. She did not even select DNA to study. It was given to her. Her theoretical crystallography was very average.
thinking fog people
Exploratory research is really like working in a fog. You don't know where you're going. You're just groping. Then people learn about it afterwards and think how straightforward it was.
thinking vision gold
The major credit I think Jim and I deserve is for selecting the right problem and sticking to it. It's true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold, but the fact remains that we were looking for gold.
thinking temptation serious
Avoid the temptation to work so hard that there is no time left for serious thinking.
act certain chain english-scientist messenger secondary seems since single virtually
It seems virtually certain that a single chain of RNA can act as messenger RNA, since poly U is a single chain without secondary structure.
assuming certain code deduce english-scientist information limited using
By using polymers of different composition and assuming a triplet code one can deduce limited information about the composition of certain triplets.
acid groups backbone
How is the base sequence, divided into codons? There is nothing in the backbone of the nucleic acid, which is perfectly regular, to show us how to group the bases into codons.
minorities may acid
The meaning of this observation is unclear, but it raises the unfortunate possibility of ambiguous triplets; that is, triplets which may code more than one amino acid. However one would certainly expect such triplets to be in a minority.
simplicity tools use
While Occam's razor is a useful tool in the physical sciences, it can be a very dangerous implement in biology. It is thus very rash to use simplicity and elegance as a guide in biological research.
determination acid would-be
Unfortunately it makes the unambiguous determination of triplets by these methods much more difficult than would be the case if there were only one triplet for each amino acid.
double-standard combination form
If poly A is added to poly U, to form a double or triple helix, the combination is inactive.