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The twisting path to truth

Francis Crick worked so fast as a scientist that he had time for other pursuits - like women and drugs.

By D.T. MAX
Published August 6, 2006

Most science writers have to make a decision. If they write about the science, no one will read it. If they write around it, no one will take them seriously. Matt Ridley, best known for his book Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, is one of a handful in the field who break this mold. In his new brief book Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code, he devotes an impressive percentage of the pages to hard science, to the details of DNA and protein structure and to how neurons firing might create consciousness, yet the humans who fire them - most notably the late British biologist Crick and his equally famous American collaborator James Watson - stay in view. The talented Ridley serves up his science without apology or pain, and the result is absorbing reading.

Francis Crick, who died two summers ago at 88, had personality to go with a remarkable mind. He was so quick in his work that plenty of time was left for other pursuits. He tried drugs, chased women, fought a spectacular battle with Watson over Watson's account of their work and had a breakdown. It is not hard to see the human behind the scientist.

Crick was born in 1916 to a middle class family, and early on his teachers spotted his scientific skills. Yet despite always being the smartest in his class or the lab, in 1951, when Watson found him at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, Crick's early promise remained unfilled: He was at work on a problem involving protein structure that didn't much interest him, struggling in his third attempt to get a Ph.D. What was holding him back was that he was a great theorizer but not much of a raw data generator. He also was a loudmouth, a kibitzer, a man who, as Ridley says, liked to finish other people's crossword puzzles whether they wanted him or not.

All these qualities meshed perfectly with the 23-year-old Watson's own exuberant intellect and the problem he turned Crick on to: the structure of DNA. What made the structure of DNA an ideal problem for Crick was that the only data you could generate about it came in the form of atomic-scale pictures called X-ray crystallographs, and other researchers were already generating them. What was missing was someone to explain how it all fit together.

Over a 17-month collaboration ending in February 1952, Watson and Crick built the first model of a DNA molecule. The find was in itself significant, but what made the work earth-shattering was that the molecule's structure - a double helix held together by bonds between two pairs of nucleic acids, each of which could bond only with the other - also explained inheritance: The structure of the helices was such that they could detach to produce copies of one another.

It is almost impossible to exaggerate how important this providential structure has been in the 50 years since. As Ridley points out, it is from Watson and Crick's eureka that most of modern molecular biology knowledge derives, everything we know today about how genes make RNA and RNA makes proteins. And Crick played a key theorizing and collating role in all of this that followed.

Although Crick's role in this march of knowledge lacks the excitement and purity of his co-discovery of the structure of DNA, it was "in many ways a greater scientific achievement than the double helix," Ridley notes. At his death, Crick was a grand old man of biology, at work trying to explain the mystery of consciousness.

Watson once explained that he wrote The Double Helix, his famous gossipy account of his collaboration with Crick, to capture a young American's sense of mystification at Britain and its ways. It's still true that for the American reader of Ridley's account, Crick and his English milieu come across as part of an uncrackable code, a culture at once randy yet repressed, aggressive yet buttoned down, suffering yet silent.

To give one example, during the 1970s Crick had some sort of breakdown. Ridley never exactly defines the reason for it, nor precisely calls it such, but Crick stopped functioning as the result of some sort of emotional stress. Was this stress the result of the illegal drugs he enjoyed at the time? The burden of being a Nobel laureate? His fight with Watson? Or the result of some inherent mental defect that went with his brilliance?

The reader never really knows. It does seem clear, though, that Crick did not need order in life to achieve it in his work. His overriding passion was for truth, but it was a specific kind of truth - about humans as biological beings - and he saw himself as a bulwark against those utterances that smacked of fuzziness, whether about genes or consciousness or God. In this regard, his mind was as pure as the structure of DNA that he so famously visualized to change the world.

D.T. Max is the author of The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery, to be published in September by Random House.

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FRANCIS CRICK: Discoverer of the Genetic Code

By Matt Ridley

HarperCollins, $19.95, 224 pp

Reviewed by D.T. MAX

[Last modified August 4, 2006, 08:56:05]