Francis Crick

Crick married Ruth Doreen Dodd and they had a son, Michael. In 1949 Crick married Odile Speed and had two daughters - Gabrielle and Jacqueline.

Skeptical of organized religion, he referred to himself as an agnostic with "a strong inclination towards atheism’. In ‘Of Molecules and Men’, he expressed his views on the relationship between science and religion.

Francis Harry Compton Crick was born on 8 June 1916, in Northampton to Harry and Annie Elizabeth Crick. His father and uncle ran the family’s boot and shoe factory.

He attended the Northampton Grammar School, and at age of 14 shifted to Mill Hill School in London on scholarship and studied mathematics, physics, and chemistry with his best friend John Shilston.

In 1937, he graduated in physics from University College London. As a PhD student and Honorary Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, he worked at the Cavendish Laboratory.

His Ph.D. project on measuring viscosity of water at high temperatures was ruined, when a WWII bomb fell on his apparatus. During his second year as a PhD student, Crick was awarded the Carey Foster Research Prize.

During World War II, he worked for the Admiralty Research Laboratory on the design of magnetic and acoustic mines, and was instrumental in designing a new mine that was effective against German minesweepers.

In 1947, Crick moved to the Strangeways Laboratory, Cambridge, headed by Honor Bridget Fell, with a Medical Research Council studentship, and studied the physical properties of cytoplasm in cultured fibroblast cells.

In 1949, he joined the Medical Research Unit at Cavendish Laboratory under the general direction of Nobel Prize winner Sir Lawrence Bragg and obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge five years later.

James Watson, a young American appeared at the lab in 1951, and he and Crick formed a collaborative working relationship unraveling the mysteries of the structure of DNA.

Using X-ray diffraction studies of DNA, in 1953, the two researchers constructed a molecular model, representing the known properties of DNA, consisting of two intertwined spiral strands referred to as the "double helix".

Watson and Crick published a paper outlining their DNA double-helical structure in the scientific journal, Nature in 1953. Subsequent research led to an explanation of the process of replication of gene and the chromosome.

Crick in 1958 explained the central dogma of molecular biology, regarding the flow of genetic information within a biological system. Such information cannot be transferred back from protein to either protein or nucleic acid.