Francis Crick

Francis Crick will be bracketed with Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein as one of the great scientists of all time. Between 1953 and 1966 he made and led a revolution in biology by discovering, quite literally, the secret of life: the digital cipher at the heart of heredity that distinguishes living from non-living things -- the genetic code. His own discoveries include not only the double helix but the whole mechanisms of protein synthesis, the three-letter nature of the code, and much of...
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Francis Crick will be bracketed with Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein as one of the great scientists of all time. Between 1953 and 1966 he made and led a revolution in biology by discovering, quite literally, the secret of life: the digital cipher at the heart of heredity that distinguishes living from non-living things -- the genetic code. His own discoveries include not only the double helix but the whole mechanisms of protein synthesis, the three-letter nature of the code, and much of the code itself. This biography traces Crick’s life through a lackluster education to his leap into biology at the age of 31. He immigrated at age 60 to California and turned his attention to the second question that had always fascinated him: What makes conscious creatures conscious?