Coordinates	40°37′29″N73°57′8″N
name	Rosalind Franklin
birth place	Notting Hill, London
nationality	British
death date	(age 37)
death place	Chelsea, London
death cause	Cancer of the ovary
field	X-ray crystallography
work institutions	British Coal Utilisation Research Association ''Laboratoire central des services chimiques de l'État'' King's College London Birkbeck College, London
alma mater	Newnham College, Cambridge
known for	Fine structure of coal and graphite, DNA structure, viruses }}

Rosalind Elsie Franklin (25 July 1920 – 16 April 1958) was a British biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer who made critical contributions to the understanding of the fine molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal and graphite. The DNA work achieved the most fame because DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) plays essential roles in cell metabolism and genetics, and the discovery of its structure helped scientists understand how genetic information is passed from parents to children.

Franklin is best known for her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA which led to discovery of DNA double helix. Her data, according to Francis Crick, were "the data we actually used" to formulate Crick and Watson's 1953 hypothesis regarding the structure of DNA. Franklin's X-ray diffraction image confirming the helical structure of DNA were shown to Watson without her approval or knowledge. Though this image and her accurate interpretation of the data provided valuable insight into the DNA structure, Franklin's scientific contributions to the discovery of the double helix are often overlooked. Unpublished drafts of her papers (written just as she was arranging to leave King's College London) show that she had independently determined the overall B-form of the DNA helix and the location of the phosphate groups on the outside of the structure. However, her work was published third, in the series of three DNA ''Nature'' articles, led by the paper of Watson and Crick which only hinted at her contribution to their hypothesis.

After finishing her portion of the DNA work, Franklin led pioneering work on the tobacco mosaic and polio viruses. She died in 1958 at the age of 37 from complications arising from ovarian cancer.

Early life and education

Franklin was born in Notting Hill, London into an affluent and influential British Jewish family. Her father was Ellis Arthur Franklin (1894–1964), a London merchant banker and her mother was Muriel Frances Waley (1894–1976); she was the elder daughter and second of the family of five children. Her father's uncle was Herbert Samuel (later Viscount Samuel) who was Home Secretary in 1916 and the first practising Jew to serve in the British Cabinet. He was also the first High Commissioner (effectively governor) for the British Mandate of Palestine. Her aunt Helen Carolin Franklin was married to Norman de Mattos Bentwich, who was Attorney General in the British Mandate of Palestine. She was active in trade union organisation and women's suffrage, and was later a member of the London County Council.

Franklin was educated at St Paul's Girls' School and North London Collegiate School where she excelled in science, Latin and sports. Her family was actively involved with a Working Men's College, where Ellis Franklin, her father, taught electricity, magnetism and the history of the Great War in the evenings and later became vice principal. Later Franklin's family helped settle Jewish refugees from Europe who had escaped the Nazis.

Cambridge, Kingston and Paris

Franklin went up to Newnham College, Cambridge in 1938 and studied chemistry within the Natural Sciences Tripos. One of the demonstrators who taught her was the spectroscopist W.C. Price. Later, he was one of her senior colleagues at King's College. In 1941 she was awarded Second Class Honours in her Finals. This was accepted as a bachelor's degree in the qualifications for employment. Cambridge started to award the titular B.A. and M.A. to women in 1947, and earlier women graduates received these retroactively. Franklin was awarded a research fellowship and, according to an entry on the web site of the Dolan DNA Learning Center of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, that is supported by the National Cancer Institute, "She spent a year in R.G.W. Norrish's lab without great success." Later, he received a Nobel Prize for his contributions to chemical kinetics.

Franklin continued to meet the requirements of the National Service Act by working as an Assistant Research Officer at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA). The BCURA was located on the Coombe Springs Estate, near Kingston upon Thames on the South West outskirts of London. Professor Norrish was a wartime advisor to BCURA. John G. Bennett was the Director. Marcello Pirani and Victor Goldschmidt, both refugees from the Nazis, were consultants and lectured at BCURA while Franklin was there. She studied the porosity of coal. This work was the basis of her Ph.D. thesis ''The physical chemistry of solid organic colloids with special reference to coal'' for which Cambridge University awarded her a Ph.D. in 1945. It was also the basis of several papers. The French scientist Adrienne Weill was one of Franklin's tutors at Newnham. At the end of the war, according to Sayre, Franklin asked Weill to let her know of job openings for "a physical chemist who knows very little physical chemistry, but quite a lot about the holes in coal". At a conference in the Fall of 1946, Weill introduced Franklin to Marcel Mathieu, a director of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the network of institutes that comprise the major part of the scientific research laboratories supported by the French government. This led to Franklin's appointment with Jacques Mering at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l'Etat in Paris.

Mering was a crystallographer who applied X-ray diffraction to the study of rayon and other amorphous substances, in contrast to the thousands of regular crystals that had been studied by this method for many years. He taught her the practical aspects of applying X-ray crystallography to amorphous substances. This presented new challenges in the conduct of experiments and the interpretation of results. Franklin applied them to further problems related to coal, in particular the changes to the arrangement of atoms when it is converted to graphite. Franklin published several further papers on this work. It became part of the main stream of work on the physics and chemistry of coal, covered by a current monograph, the annual and other publications. Mering also continued the study of carbon in various forms, using X-ray diffraction and other methods.

King's College London

In January 1951, Franklin started working as a research associate at King's College London in the Medical Research Council's (MRC) Biophysics Unit, directed by John Randall. Although originally she was to have worked on x-ray diffraction of proteins and lipids in solution, Randall redirected her work to DNA fibers before she started working at King's since Franklin was to be the only experienced experimental diffraction researcher at King's in 1951. He made this reassignment, even before she started working at King's, because of the following pioneering work by Maurice Wilkins and Raymond Gosling- a PhD student assigned to help Franklin. Even using crude equipment, these two men had obtained an outstanding diffraction picture of DNA which sparked further interest in this molecule. Wilkins and Gosling had been carrying out x-ray diffraction analysis of DNA in the Unit since May 1950, but Randall had not informed them that he had asked Franklin to take over both the DNA diffraction work and guidance of Gosling's thesis. Randall's lack of communication about this reassignment significantly contributed to the well documented friction that developed between Wilkins and Franklin.

Franklin, working with her student Raymond Gosling, started to apply her expertise in x-ray diffraction techniques to the structure of DNA. She used a new fine focus x-ray tube and microcamera ordered by Wilkins, but which she refined, adjusted and focused carefully. Drawing upon her physical chemistry background, Franklin also skillfully manipulated the critical hydration of her specimens. When Wilkins inquired about this improved technique, Franklin replied in terms which offended Wilkins as Franklin had "an air of cool superiority". Franklin's habit of intensely looking people in the eye while being concise, impatient and directly confrontational to the point of abrasiveness unnerved many of her colleagues. In stark contrast, Wilkins was very shy, and slowly calculating in speech while he avoided looking anyone directly in the eye. In spite of the intense atmosphere, Franklin and Gosling discovered that there were two forms of DNA: at high humidity (when wet), the DNA fibre became long and thin; when it was dried it became short and fat. These forms were termed DNA 'B' and 'A' respectively. Because of the intense personality conflict developing between Franklin and Wilkins, Randall divided the work on DNA. Franklin chose the data rich A form while Wilkins selected the 'B' form because his preliminary pictures had hinted it might be helical. He showed tremendous insight in this assessment of preliminary data. The x-ray diffraction pictures taken by Franklin at this time have been called, by J. D. Bernal, "amongst the most beautiful x-ray photographs of any substance ever taken". In July 1952, as a practical joke on Wilkins (who frequently expressed his view that DNA was helical), Franklin and Gosling produced a death notice regretting the 'death' of helical crystalline DNA (A-DNA). During 1952, Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling worked at applying the Patterson function to the x-ray pictures of DNA they had produced. This was a long and labour-intensive approach but would yield significant insight into the structure of the molecule.

By January 1953, Franklin had reconciled her conflicting data and had started to write a series of three draft manuscripts, two of which included a double helical DNA backbone (see below). Her two A form manuscripts reached Acta Crystallographica in Copenhagen on 6 March 1953, one day before Crick and Watson had completed their model. Franklin must have mailed them while the Cambridge team was building their model, and certainly had written them before she knew of their work. On 8 July 1953 she modified one of these "in proof", Acta articles "in light of recent work" by the King's and Cambridge research teams. The third draft paper on the 'B' form of DNA, dated 17 March 1953, was discovered years later amongst her papers, by Franklin's Birkbeck colleague, Aaron Klug. He then published an evaluation of the draft's close correlation with the third of the original trio of 25 April 1953 ''Nature'' DNA articles. Klug designed this paper to complement the first article he had written defending Franklin's significant contribution to DNA structure. He had written this first article in response to the incomplete picture of Franklin's work depicted in Watson's 1968 memoir, ''The Double Helix''.

As vividly described in ''The Double Helix'', on 30 January 1953, Watson travelled to King's carrying a preprint of Linus Pauling's incorrect proposal for DNA structure. Since Wilkins was not in his office, Watson went to Franklin's lab with his urgent message that they should all collaborate before Pauling discovered his error. The unimpressed Franklin became angry when Watson suggested she did not know how to interpret her own data. Watson hastily retreated, backing into Wilkins who had been attracted by the commotion. Wilkins commiserated with his harried friend and then changed the course of DNA history with the following disclosure. Without Franklin's permission or knowledge, Wilkins showed Watson Franklin's famous photograph 51. Watson, in turn, showed Wilkins a pre-publication manuscript by Pauling and Corey. Franklin and Gosling's photo 51 gave the Cambridge pair critical insights into the DNA structure, whereas Pauling and Corey's paper described a molecule remarkably like their first incorrect model.

In February 1953, Francis Crick and James D. Watson of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge University had started to build a model of the B form of DNA using similar data to that available to both teams at King's. Much of their data were derived directly from research done at King's by Wilkins and Franklin. Franklin's research was completed by February 1953, ahead of her move to Birkbeck, and her data were critical. Model building had been applied successfully in the elucidation of the structure of the alpha helix by Linus Pauling in 1951, but Franklin was opposed to prematurely building theoretical models, until sufficient data were obtained properly to guide the model building. She took the view that building a model was to be undertaken only after enough of the structure was known. Ever cautious she wanted to eliminate misleading possibilities. Photographs of her Birkbeck work table show that she routinely used small molecular models, although certainly not ones on the grand scale successfully used at Cambridge for DNA. In the middle of February 1953, Crick's thesis advisor, Max Perutz gave Crick a copy of a report written for a Medical Research Council biophysics committee visit to King's in December 1952, containing many of Franklin's crystallographic calculations. Since Franklin had decided to transfer to Birkbeck College and Randall had insisted that all DNA work must stay at King's, Wilkins was given copies of Franklin's diffraction photographs by Gosling. By 28 February 1953 Watson and Crick felt they had solved the problem enough for Crick to proclaim (in the local pub) that they had "found the secret of life". However they knew they must complete their model before they could be certain.

Watson and Crick finished building their model on 7 March 1953, one day before they received a letter from Wilkins stating that Franklin was finally leaving and they could put "all hands to the pump". This was also one day after Franklin's two A form papers had reached Acta Crystallographica. Wilkins came to see the model the following week, according to Maddox on 12 March, and allegedly informed Gosling on his return to King's. It is uncertain how long it took for Gosling to inform Franklin at Birkbeck, but her original 17 March B form manuscript does not reflect any knowledge of the Cambridge model. Franklin did modify this draft later before publishing it as the third in the trio of 25 April 1953 ''Nature'' articles. On 18 March, in response to receiving a copy of their preliminary manuscript, Wilkins penned the following "I think you're a couple of old rogues, but you may well have something".

Crick and Watson then published their model in ''Nature'' on 25 April 1953 in an article describing the double-helical structure of DNA with only a footnote acknowledging "having been stimulated by a general knowledge of" Franklin and Wilkin's 'unpublished' contribution. Actually, although it was the bare minimum, they had just enough specific knowledge of Franklin and Gosling's data upon which to base their model. As a result of a deal struck by the two laboratory directors, articles by Wilkins and Franklin, which included their x-ray diffraction data, were modified and then published second and third in the same issue of ''Nature'', seemingly only in support of the Crick and Watson theoretical paper which proposed a model for the B form of DNA. Franklin left King's College London in March 1953 to move to Birkbeck College in a move that had been planned for some time. Franklin retained her scepticism for premature model building even after seeing the Crick–Watson model, and remained unimpressed. She is reported to have commented, "It's very pretty, but how are they going to prove it?" As an experimental scientist Franklin seems to have been interested in producing far greater evidence before publishing-as-proven a proposed model. As such her response to the Crick–Watson model was in keeping with her cautious approach to science. However, as documented above, she did not hesitate to publish preliminary ideas about DNA in Acta, even before they could be definitively proven. Most of the scientific community hesitated several years before accepting the double helix proposal. At first mainly geneticists embraced the model because of its obvious genetic implications. Broader acceptance for the DNA double helix did not start until about 1960, and was not openly acknowledged until 1961 during the 1962 Nobel prize nominations. It took Wilkins and his colleagues approximately seven years to collect enough data to prove and refine the proposed DNA structure. According to the 1961 Crick–Monod letter cited above, this experimental proof, along with Wilkins having initiated the DNA diffraction work, were the reasons why Crick felt that Wilkins should be included in the DNA Nobel prize.

Birkbeck College

Franklin's work in Birkbeck involved the use of x-ray crystallography to study the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) as a senior scientist with her own research group, funded by the Agricultural Research Council (ARC). She was recruited by physics department chair J. D. Bernal, a brilliant crystallographer who happened to be an Irish communist, known for promoting women crystallographers. In 1954 Franklin began a longstanding and successful collaboration with Aaron Klug. In 1955 Franklin had a paper published in the journal ''Nature'', indicating that TMV virus particles were all of the same length, this was in direct contradiction to the ideas of the eminent virologist Norman Pirie, though her observation ultimately proved correct.

Franklin, and the research group she headed, focused on the structure of RNA, a molecule equally central to life as DNA. RNA actually constitutes the genome (central information molecule) of many viruses, including tobacco mosaic virus. She assigned the study of rod-like viruses such as TMV (tobacco mosaic virus) to her PhD student Kenneth Holmes, while her colleague Aaron Klug worked on spherical viruses with his student John Finch, with Franklin coordinating and overseeing the work. Franklin also had a research assistant, James Watt, subsidised by the National Coal Board and was now the ''Leader of the "ARC group at Birkbeck''. By the end of 1955 her team had completed a model of the TMV, to be exhibited at the upcoming Brussels World's fair. The Birkbeck team members were working on RNA viruses affecting several plants, including potato, turnip, tomato and pea. Franklin and Don Caspar produced a paper each in ''Nature'' that taken together demonstrated that the DNA in TMV is wound along the inner surface of the hollow virus.

Her former colleagues at Birkbeck College, London Aaron Klug, John Finch and Kenneth Holmes moved to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge in 1962.

Illness and death

In the summer of 1956, while on a work-related trip to the United States, Franklin first began to suspect a health problem—she found she could no longer do up her skirt because of a lump around her abdomen. An operation in September of the same year revealed two tumours in her abdomen. After this period and other periods of hospitalization, Franklin spent time convalescing with various friends and family members. These included Anne Sayre, Francis Crick, his wife Odile, with whom Franklin had formed a strong friendship, and finally with the Roland and Nina Franklin family where Rosalind's nieces and nephews bolstered her spirits. Franklin chose not to stay with her parents because her mother's uncontrollable grief and crying upset her too much. Even while undergoing cancer treatment, Franklin continued to work, and her group continued to produce results, seven papers in 1956 and a further six in 1957. In 1957, the group was also working on the polio virus and had obtained funding from the Public Health Service of the National Institutes of Health in the United States for this. At the end of 1957, Franklin again fell ill and she was admitted to the Royal Marsden Hospital. She returned to work in January 1958 and she was given a promotion to ''Research Associate in Biophysics''. She fell ill again on March 30 and died on April 16, 1958, in Chelsea, London, of bronchopneumonia, secondary carcinomatosis and carcinoma of the ovary. Exposure to X-ray radiation is sometimes considered a possible factor in her illness. Other members of her family have died of cancer, and the incidence of "female" cancer is known to be disproportionately high among Ashkenazi Jews. Her death certificate read: ''A Research Scientist, Spinster, Daughter of Ellis Arthur Franklin, a Banker.''

Controversies after death

Various controversies surrounding Rosalind Franklin came to light following her death.

Allegations of sexism

Sayre states "In 1951 ... King's College as an institution, was not distinguished for the welcome that it offered to women ... Rosalind ... was unused to ''purdah'' ... there was one other woman scientist on the laboratory staff" (page 96, lines 8 to 10; page 97, line 4;page 99, footnote). Andrzej Stasiak states "Sayre's book became widely cited in feminist circles for exposing rampant sexism in science." Farooq Hussain states "there were seven women in the biophysics department ... Jean Hanson became an FRS, Dame Honor B. Fell, Director of Strangeways Laboratory, supervised the biologists". Maddox states, (page 134, final paragraph) "Randall ... did have many women on his staff ... they found him ... sympathetic and helpful."

Sayre states "that while the male staff at King's lunched in a large, comfortable, rather clubby dining room" the female staff of all ranks "lunched in the student's hall or away from the premises". Elkin states that most of the MRC group typically ate lunch together (including Franklin) in the mixed dining room discussed below. And Maddox states, of Randall, "He liked to see his flock, men and women, come together for morning coffee, and at lunch in the joint dining room, where he ate with them nearly every day."

Claustrophobia has been cited as an unrecognised confound to some interpersonal issues attributed to sexism. Nevertheless, sexism is said to pervade the memoir of one peer, James Watson, in his book ''The Double Helix'' published 10 years after Franklin's death and after Watson had returned from Cambridge to Harvard. In this, he denigrates her work and frequently refers to her in patronizing terms as "Rosy", a name she never used. Much later, at Cambridge, Francis Crick acknowledges, "I'm afraid we always used to adopt--let's say, a ''patronizing'' attitude towards her". And another Cambridge colleague, Peter Cavendish wrote in a letter, "Wilkins is supposed to be doing this work; Miss Franklin is evidently a fool".

Ironically, Franklin herself is said to have been "not immune to the sexism rampant in these circles; in a letter to her parents in January 1939, she called one lecturer 'very good, though female'".

Contribution to the model of DNA

One of Rosalind Franklin's important contributions to the Crick and Watson model was her lecture at the seminar in November 1951, where she presented to those present, among them Watson, the two forms of the molecule, type A and type B, and her position whereby the phosphate units are located in the external part of the molecule. She also specified the amount of water to be found in the molecule in accordance with other parts of it, data that have considerable importance in terms of the stability of the molecule. Franklin was the first to discover and formulate these facts, which in fact constituted the basis for all later attempts to build a model of the molecule. The other contribution included an X-ray photograph of B-DNA (called photograph 51), that was briefly shown to James Watson by Maurice Wilkins in January 1953, and a report written for an MRC biophysics committee visit to King's in December 1952 which was shown by Dr. Max Perutz at the Cavendish Laboratory to both Crick and Watson. This MRC report contained data from the King's group, including some of Rosalind Franklin's and Raymond Gosling's work, and was given to Francis Crick — who was working on his thesis on haemoglobin structure — by his thesis supervisor Max Perutz, a member of the visiting committee. Maurice Wilkins had been given photograph 51 by Rosalind Franklin's Ph.D. student Raymond Gosling, because she was leaving King's to work at Birkbeck. There was allegedly nothing untoward in this transfer of data to Wilkins, since the Director Sir John Randall had insisted that all DNA work belonged exclusively to King's and had instructed Franklin in a letter to even stop thinking about it. Also it was implied by Horace Freeland Judson, incorrectly, that Maurice Wilkins had taken the photograph out of Rosalind Franklin's drawer. However, the B-DNA X-ray pattern photograph in question was shown to Watson by Wilkins — without Franklin's permission.

Likewise Max Perutz saw "no harm" in showing an MRC report containing the conclusions of Franklin and Gosling's X-ray data analysis to Crick, since it had not been marked as confidential, although – in the customary British manner in which everything official is considered secret until it is deliberately made public – "The report was not expected to reach outside eyes". Indeed, after the publication of Watson's ''The Double Helix'' exposed Perutz's act, he received so many letters questioning his judgment that he felt the need to both answer them all and to post a general statement in ''Science'' excusing himself on the basis of being "inexperienced and casual in administrative matters".

Perutz also claimed that the MRC information was already made available to the Cambridge team when Watson had attended Franklin's seminar in November 1951. A preliminary version of much of the important material contained in the 1952 December MRC report had been presented by Franklin in a talk she had given in 1951 November, which Dr. Watson had attended but not understood. This seems to be a rather tenuous claim. There is a significant difference between the results Franklin achieved at the end of 1951 (at the time of the seminar) and those she held when editing the report – at the end of 1952. It was a year in which her knowledge substantially increased. This and more, Watson and Crick received the report from Perutz during February, 1953, a short time after Watson received Franklin’s type B photograph, no. 51. Thus, there is no doubt that the report helped them to analyze Franklin’s correct data, which explain this and other photographs.

The Perutz letter was as said one of three letters, published with letters by Wilkins and Watson, which discussed their various contributions. Watson clarified the importance of the data obtained from the MRC report as he had not recorded these data while attending Franklin's lecture in 1951. The upshot of all this was that when Crick and Watson started to build their model in February 1953 they were working with critical parameters that had been determined by Franklin in 1951, and which she and Gosling had significantly refined in 1952, as well as with published data and other very similar data to those available at King's. Rosalind Franklin was probably never aware that her work had been used during construction of the model, but Maurice Wilkins was.

Recognition of her contribution to the model of DNA

Upon the completion of their model, Francis Crick and James Watson had invited Maurice Wilkins to be a co-author of their paper describing the structure. Wilkins turned down this offer, as he had taken no part in building the model. Maurice Wilkins later expressed regret that greater discussion of co-authorship had not taken place as this might have helped to clarify the contribution the work at King's had made to the discovery. There is no doubt that Franklin's experimental data were used by Crick and Watson to build their model of DNA in 1953 (see above). Some, including Maddox as cited next, have explained this citation omission by suggesting that it may be a question of circumstance, because it would have been very difficult to cite the unpublished work from the MRC report they had seen. Indeed a clear timely acknowledgment would have been awkward, given the unorthodox manner in which data were transferred from King's to Cambridge, however methods were available. Watson and Crick could have cited the MRC report as a personal communication or else cited the Acta articles in press, or most easily, the third ''Nature'' paper that they knew was in press. One of the most important accomplishments of Maddox's widely acclaimed biography is that Maddox made a well-received case for inadequate acknowledgement. "Such acknowledgement as they gave her was very muted and always coupled with the name of Wilkins".

Twenty five years after the fact, the first clear recitation of Franklin's contribution appeared as it permeated Watson's account, ''The Double Helix'', although it was buried under allegations that Franklin did not know how to interpret her own data and that she should have therefore shared her work with Wilkins, Watson, and Crick. This attitude is epitomized in the confrontation between Watson and Franklin over a pre-print of Pauling's mistaken DNA manuscript. Watson's words impelled Sayre to write her rebuttal, in which she designs her entire chapter nine, "Winner Take All" to be like a legal brief dissecting and analyzing the topic of acknowledgement. Unfortunately Sayre's early analysis was often ignored because of the supposed feminist overtones in her book. It should be noted that in their original paper, Watson and Crick do cite the X-ray diffraction work of both Wilkins and William Astbury. In addition, they admit their, "having been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental work of [groups led by both Wilkins and Franklin]". Franklin and Raymond Gosling's own publication in the same issue of ''Nature'' was the first publication of this more clarified X-ray image of DNA.

Franklin's part in the discovery of the nature of DNA was shown in the 1987 TV Movies ''Life Story'', starring Tim Pigott-Smith as Francis Crick, Alan Howard as Maurice Wilkins, Jeff Goldblum as James Watson, and Juliet Stevenson as Rosalind. This movie portrayed Franklin in a somewhat stern role, but also alleged that Watson and Crick did use a lot of her work to do theirs.

Nobel Prize

The rules of the Nobel Prize forbid posthumous nominations The award was for their body of work on nucleic acids and not exclusively for the discovery of the structure of DNA. By the time of the award Wilkins had been working on the structure of DNA for more than 10 years, and had done much to confirm the Watson-Crick model. Crick had been working on the genetic code at Cambridge and Watson had worked on RNA for some years.

Posthumous recognition

1982, Iota Sigma Pi designated Franklin a National Honorary Member. 1992, English Heritage placed a blue plaque on the house Rosalind Franklin grew up in.

1993, King's College London rename the Orchard Residence at their Hampstead Campus on Kidderpore Avenue Rosalind Franklin Hall.

1995, Newnham College dedicated a residence in her name and put a bust of her in its garden. 1997, Birkbeck, University of London School of Crystallography opened the Rosalind Franklin laboratory. 1998, National Portrait Gallery added Rosalind Franklin's next to those of Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins. 2000, King's College London opened the Franklin-Wilkins Building in honour of Dr. Franklin's and Professor Wilkins's work at the college. King's had earlier, in 1994, also named one of the Halls in Hampstead Campus residences in memory of Rosalind Franklin. 2001, The U.S. National Cancer Institute established the Rosalind E. Franklin Award for Women in Science. 2003, the Royal Society established the Rosalind Franklin Award, for an outstanding contribution to any area of natural science, engineering or technology. 2004, Finch University of Health Sciences/The Chicago Medical School, located in North Chicago, IL, changed its name to Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science.

2004, University of Groningen in the Netherlands installed Rosalind Franklin fellowships to promote the hiring of young, promising, female researchers.

2005, the wording on the DNA sculpture (which was donated by James Watson) outside Clare College's Thirkill Court, Cambridge, UK is a) on the base: i) "These strands unravel during cell reproduction. Genes are encoded in the sequence of bases." and ii) ''"The double helix model was supported by the work of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins."'', as well as b) on the helices: i) "The structure of DNA was discovered in 1953 by Francis Crick and James Watson while Watson lived here at Clare." and ii) "The molecule of DNA has two helical strands that are linked by base pairs Adenine – Thymine or Guanine – Cytosine."

2008, Columbia University awarded an Honorary Horwitz Prize to Rosalind Franklin, Ph.D., posthumously, "for her seminal contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA".

Publications

Rosalind Franklin produced a number of publications, some cited a number of times. A representative sample is listed below. The last two publications in this list were published posthumously.

Footnotes

References

Bryson, B. ''A Short History of Nearly Everything.'' (2004). Black Swan ISBN 0-552-99704-8.

Crick, F. H. C. ''What Mad Pursuit'', (1988). Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-09137-7.

Elkin, L., O. ''Rosalind Franklin and the Double Helix Physics Today'' March 2003, pp. 42–48.

Ferry, Georgina, 2007. Max Perutz and the Secret of Life. Published in the UK by Chatto & Windus (ISBN 0-701-17695-4), and in the USA by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.

Franklin, R.E. and Gosling, R.G. authors of papers received 6 March 1953: Acta Cryst. (1953). 6, 673 The Structure of Sodium Thymonucleate Fibres I. The Influence of Water Content II. The Cylindrically Symmetrical Patterson Function

Holt, J. (2002) "Photo Finish: Rosalind Franklin and the great DNA race" ''The New Yorker'' October

Judson, Horace Freeland, "The Eighth Day of Creation:Makers of the Revolution in Biology" ( London: Jonathan Cape,1979),Penguin,1995;expanded edition;New York:Cold Spring Harbor Press,1996).

Maddox, B. ''Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA'' (2002). Harper Collins ISBN 0-00-655211-0.

Nobel Prize (1962). ''The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1962'', ''for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material'', Nobelprize.org

Olby, R., "The Path to the Double Helix"(London:Macmillan,1974)

Sayre, A. 1975. ''Rosalind Franklin and DNA''. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. ISBN 0-393-32044-8.

Segev, T. ''One Palestine, Complete'', (2000) (ISBN 0-349-11286-X) Abacus History.

Stent, Gunther, editor. "Critical Edition of The Double Helix"(1980) W.W. Norton Co, New York and London. ISBN 0-393-95075-1.

Watson, J. Letter to ''Science'', ''164'', p. 1539, 27 (1969).

Wilkins, M., ''The Third Man of the Double Helix, an autobiography'' (2003) Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 0-19-280667-X.

Yockey, H. P. ''Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life'' (2005).

Further reading

Brown, Andrew; "''J. D. Bernal: The Sage of Science''", Oxford University Press, 2005; ISBN 0-199-20565-5

Chomet, S. (Ed.), ''D.N.A. Genesis of a Discovery''. Newman-Hemisphere Press (1994): NB a few copies are available from Newman-Hemisphere at 101 Swan Court, London SW3 5RY (phone/fax: 07092 060530).

Crick, Francis (1988) "What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery" (Basic Books reprint edition, 1990) ISBN 0-465-09138-5

Dickerson, Richard E.; ''"Present at the Flood: How Structural Molecular Biology Came About",'' Sinauer, 2005; ISBN 0-878-93168-6

John Finch; 'A Nobel Fellow On Every Floor', Medical Research Council 2008, 381 pp, ISBN 978-1840469-40-0; this book is all about the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge

Hager, Thomas; "''Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling''", Simon & Schuster 1995; ISBN 0-684-80909-5

Glynn, Jennifer Franklin. "Rosalind Franklin, 1920–1958" in "Cambridge Women: Twelve Portraits" (CUP 1996) pp 267 – 282 eds. Edward Shils and Carmen Blacker, ISBN 0521482879

Klug, A. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article on R.E. Franklin, OUP, Matthew H.C.G. Ed., first published Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2007, 1840 words; ISBN 019861411X; was selected "Life of The Day" on 16 April 2008 (50th anniversary of her death).

Klug, A. A lecture about Rosalind Franklin's contribution to the elucidation of the structure of DNA. in ''DNA Changing Science and Society: The Darwin Lectures for 2003'' Krude, Torsten (Ed.) CUP (2003)

Olby, Robert, (1972) 'Rosalind Elsie Franklin' biography in "Dictionary of Scientific Biography", ed. Charles C. Gillespie (New York: Charles Scribner's sons) ISBN: ISBN 0684101211

Olby, Robert, ''The Path to The Double Helix: Discovery of DNA'', (1974). MacMillan ISBN 0-486-68117-3

Tait, Sylvia & James "A Quartet of Unlikely Discoveries" (Athena Press 2004) ISBN 184401343X

Wilkins, Maurice, "The Third Man of The Double Helix", OUP 2003; ISBN 978-0-19-280667-3.

External links

Rosalind Franklin in CWP at UCLA

The History of medicine topographical database in ub Himetop

The People's Archive: Sir Aaron Klug – see part 2, stories 12/13/17/18 re. Rosalind Franklin and:

Work at Birbeck and meeting REF (12)

Work with REF (13)

REF and the discovery of the structure of DNA. (17)

REF's death and joining the MRC's LMB in Cambridge (18)

Articles

My aunt, the DNA pioneer by S. Franklin

"Rosalind Franklin and the Double Helix", ''Physics Today'', by Lynne O. Elkin

"Light on a Dark Lady", republished article by A. Piper from ''Trends in Biochemical Science''

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography for article by Sir Aaron Klug

"The first American newspaper coverage of the discovery of the DNA structure", Saturday, June 13, 1953, ''The New York Times''

Lynne O. Elkin, "Biography of Rosalind Franklin", ''Jewish Women Encyclopedia''

Documentaries

''Nova'': "Secret of Photo 51"

Plays

, "Photograph 51" by Anna Ziegler was most recently presented at Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York City from October 27-November 21, 2010.

Collections and publications

The Rosalind Franklin Society.

The Rosalind Franklin Papers - Profiles in Science, National Library of Medicine

Anne Sayre Collection of Rosalind Franklin Materials

Lynne Elkin collection of original Franklin research at the Bancroft Archive of the University of California, Berkeley

The Rosalind Franklin Papers at Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge.

Rosalind Franklin publications. List of publications from 1948 to (posthumous reprint) 1995.

Key Participants: Rosalind Franklin – ''Linus Pauling and the Race for DNA: A Documentary History''

"Rosalind Franklin's work on coal, carbon, and graphite", by Peter J F Harris in PDF format

Energia Vol.6 No.6 (1995) (University of Kentucky centre for Applied Energy Research). Contains Rosalind Franklin Article in PDF format

Category:1920 births Category:1958 deaths Category:Academics of King's College London Category:Academics of Birkbeck, University of London Category:Alumni of Newnham College, Cambridge Category:Biophysicists Category:English scientists Category:English biologists Category:English chemists Category:English Jews Category:English physicists Category:Cancer deaths in England Category:Deaths from ovarian cancer Category:Jewish scientists Category:Molecular biologists Category:Old Paulinas Category:Women biologists Category:Women chemists Category:Women scientists Category:People in the history of medicine

ar:روزاليند فرانكلين ast:Rosalind Franklin bn:রোজালিন্ড ফ্রাঙ্কলিন zh-min-nan:Rosalind Franklin bg:Розалинд Франклин ca:Rosalind Franklin cs:Rosalind Franklinová da:Rosalind Franklin de:Rosalind Franklin es:Rosalind Franklin eo:Rosalind Franklin eu:Rosalind Franklin fa:روزالیند فرانکلین fr:Rosalind Elsie Franklin gl:Rosalind Franklin ko:로절린드 프랭클린 id:Rosalind Franklin is:Rosalind Franklin it:Rosalind Franklin he:רוזלינד פרנקלין jv:Rosalind Franklin ht:Rosalind Franklin lv:Rozalinda Franklina nl:Rosalind Franklin ja:ロザリンド・フランクリン no:Rosalind Franklin oc:Rosalind Franklin pl:Rosalind Franklin pt:Rosalind Franklin ru:Франклин, Розалинд sk:Rosalind Elsie Franklin fi:Rosalind Franklin sv:Rosalind Franklin tr:Rosalind Franklin uk:Розалінда Франклін zh:羅莎琳·富蘭克林

James Watson is the name of:

James Watson (actor) (born 1970), British film and television actor

James Watson (New York) (1750–1806), United States Senator from New York

James Watson (soldier) (born 1850), American soldier, participant in the Battle of the Little Bighorn

James Watson (trumpeter), English trumpet player, conductor and professor at the Royal Academy of Music

James Watson (wrestler), professional wrestler, pseudonym Mikey Whipwreck

James Watson (author) (born 1936), author from Lancashire

James A. Watson (born c. 1956), United States Coast Guard rear admiral

James Cameron Watson (born 1891), Canadian politician, mayor of Calgary

James Craig Watson (1838–1880), Canadian-American astronomer

James D. Watson (born 1928), American biologist and co-discoverer of the structure of DNA

James Eli Watson (c. 1864–1948), United States Representative and Senator from Indiana

James F. Watson (1840–1897), American judge and attorney

James Lopez Watson (1922–2001), United States Federal judge, first black judge to head a federal court in the South

James S. Watson (1882–1952), first African American judge elected in New York state

James Sibley Watson (1894–1982), American philanthropist, publisher, and early experimenter in motion pictures

James Watson (MP) (1817–1895), English merchant, dairy herdsman and Conservative politician, MP 1885–1892

James Watson (British Army officer), Commander-in-Chief, India

James Watson (Scottish footballer), Rangers F.C. and Scotland international footballer of the 1870s

James Watson (Australian politician), New South Wales Colonial Treasurer from 1878 to 1883

See also

Jamie Watson (disambiguation)

Jim Watson (disambiguation)

es:James Watson ko:제임스 왓슨 (동음이의) sl:James Watson vi:James Watson (định hướng) zh:詹姆斯·沃森 (消歧義)

Coordinates	40°37′29″N73°57′8″N
name	Francis Crick
birth date	8 June 1916
birth place	Weston Favell, Northamptonshire, England
residence	UK, U.S.
nationality	British
death date	July 28, 2004
death place	San Diego, California, U.S.
death cause	Colon cancer
field	Physics, Molecular biology
work institutions	Institute for the Furtherment of Genetic Studies
alma mater	University College LondonUniversity of Cambridge
doctoral advisor	Max Perutz
known for	DNA structure, consciousness
prizes	Nobel Prize (1962)
religion	Agnostic
signature	Francis Crick signature.svg }}

Francis Harry Compton Crick OM FRS (8 June 1916 – 28 July 2004) was an English molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist, and most noted for being one of two co-discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953, together with James D. Watson. He, Watson and Maurice Wilkins were jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".

Crick was an important theoretical molecular biologist and played a crucial role in research related to revealing the genetic code. He is widely known for use of the term “central dogma” to summarize an idea that genetic information flow in cells is essentially one-way, from DNA to RNA to protein.

During the remainder of his career, he held the post of J.W. Kieckhefer Distinguished Research Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. His later research centered on theoretical neurobiology and attempts to advance the scientific study of human consciousness. He remained in this post until his death; "he was editing a manuscript on his death bed, a scientist until the bitter end" said Christof Koch.

Family and education

Francis Crick was the first son of Harry Crick (1887–1948) and Annie Elizabeth Crick, née Wilkins, (1879–1955). He was born and raised in Weston Favell, then a small village near the English town of Northampton in which Crick’s father and uncle ran the family’s boot and shoe factory. His grandfather, Walter Drawbridge Crick (1857–1903), an amateur naturalist, wrote a survey of local foraminifera (single-celled protists with shells), corresponded with Charles Darwin, and had two gastropods (snails or slugs) named after him.

At an early age, Francis was attracted to science and what he could learn about it from books. As a child, he was taken to church by his parents, but by about age 12 he told his mother that he no longer wanted to attend, preferring a scientific search for answers over religious belief. He was educated at Northampton Grammar School and, after the age of 14, Mill Hill School in London (on scholarship), where he studied mathematics, physics, and chemistry with his best friend John Shilston. He shared the Walter Knox Prize for Chemistry on Foundation Day, Friday, 7 July 1933.

At the age of 21 Crick earned a B.Sc. degree in physics from University College London. Crick had failed to gain a place at a Cambridge college, probably through failing their requirement for Latin. Crick later became a PhD student and Honorary Fellow of Caius College and mainly worked at the Cavendish Laboratory and the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He was also an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College and of University College, London.

Crick began a Ph.D. research project on measuring viscosity of water at high temperatures (which he later described as "the dullest problem imaginable") in the laboratory of physicist Edward Neville da Costa Andrade at University College, London, but with the outbreak of World War II (in particular, an incident during the Battle of Britain when a bomb fell through the roof of the laboratory and destroyed his experimental apparatus), Crick was deflected from a possible career in physics.

During World War II, he worked for the Admiralty Research Laboratory, from which emerged a group of many notable scientists, including David Bates, Robert Boyd, George Deacon, John Gunn, Harrie Massey and Nevill Mott; he worked on the design of magnetic and acoustic mines and was instrumental in designing a new mine that was effective against German minesweepers.

After World War II, in 1947, Crick began studying biology and became part of an important migration of physical scientists into biology research. This migration was made possible by the newly won influence of physicists such as Sir John Randall, who had helped win the war with inventions such as radar. Crick had to adjust from the "elegance and deep simplicity" of physics to the "elaborate chemical mechanisms that natural selection had evolved over billions of years." He described this transition as, "almost as if one had to be born again." According to Crick, the experience of learning physics had taught him something important—hubris—and the conviction that since physics was already a success, great advances should also be possible in other sciences such as biology. Crick felt that this attitude encouraged him to be more daring than typical biologists who tended to concern themselves with the daunting problems of biology and not the past successes of physics.

For the better part of two years, Crick worked on the physical properties of cytoplasm at Cambridge's Strangeways Laboratory, headed by Honor Bridget Fell, with a Medical Research Council studentship, until he joined Max Perutz and John Kendrew at the Cavendish Laboratory. The Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge was under the general direction of Sir Lawrence Bragg, who won the Nobel Prize in 1915 at the age of 25. Bragg was influential in the effort to beat a leading American chemist, Linus Pauling, to the discovery of DNA's structure (after having been 'pipped-at-the-post' by Pauling's success in determining the alpha helix structure of proteins). At the same time Bragg's Cavendish Laboratory was also effectively competing with King's College London, whose Biophysics department was under the direction of Sir John Randall. (Randall had turned down Francis Crick from working at King's College.) Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins of King's College were personal friends, which influenced subsequent scientific events as much as the close friendship between Crick and James Watson. Crick and Wilkins first met at King's College and not, as erroneously recorded by two authors, at the Admiralty during World War II.

He married twice, was father to three children and grandfather to six grandchildren; his brother Anthony (born in 1918) predeceased him in 1966

Spouses: Ruth Doreen Crick, née Dodd (b. 1913, m. 18 February 1940 – 8 May 1947), now Mrs. James Stewart Potter; Odile Crick, née Speed (b. 11 August 1920, m. 14 August 1949 – 28 July 2004, d. 5 July 2007)

Children: Michael Francis Compton (b. 25 November 1940) [by Doreen Crick]; Gabrielle Anne (b. 15 July 1951) and Jacqueline Marie-Therese [later Nichols] (b. 12 March 1954, d. 28 February 2011) [by Odile Crick];

Grandchildren: Alexander (b. March 1974), Kindra (b. May 1976), Camberley (b. June 1978), and Francis (b. February 1981), Michael & Barbara Crick's children; Mark & Nicholas, Jacqueline and Christopher Nichols' children.

Crick died of colon cancer on 28 July 2004 at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) Thornton Hospital in La Jolla; he was cremated and his ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean. A public memorial was held on 27 September 2004 at The Salk Institute, La Jolla, near San Diego, California; guest speakers included James D. Watson, Sydney Brenner, Alex Rich, the late Seymour Benzer, Aaron Klug, Christof Koch, Pat Churchland, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Tomaso Poggio, the late Leslie Orgel, Terry Sejnowski, his son Michael Crick, and his youngest daughter the late Jacqueline Nichols. A private memorial for family and colleagues had already been held on 3 August 2004.

Biology research

Crick was interested in two fundamental unsolved problems of biology. First, how molecules make the transition from the non-living to the living, and second, how the brain makes a conscious mind. He realized that his background made him more qualified for research on the first topic and the field of biophysics. It was at this time of Crick’s transition from physics into biology that he was influenced by both Linus Pauling and Erwin Schrödinger. It was clear in theory that covalent bonds in biological molecules could provide the structural stability needed to hold genetic information in cells. It only remained as an exercise of experimental biology to discover exactly which molecule was the genetic molecule. In Crick’s view, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, Gregor Mendel’s genetics and knowledge of the molecular basis of genetics, when combined, revealed the secret of life. Crick had the very optimistic view that life would very soon be created in a test tube. However, some people (such as fellow researcher and colleague Esther Lederberg) thought that Crick's views were overly optimistic

It was clear that some macromolecule such as protein was likely to be the genetic molecule. However, it was well-known that proteins are structural and functional macromolecules, some of which carry out enzymatic reactions of cells. In the 1940s, some evidence had been found pointing to another macromolecule, DNA, the other major component of chromosomes, as a candidate genetic molecule. In the 1944 Avery-MacLeod-McCarty experiment, Oswald Avery and his collaborators showed that a heritable phenotypic difference could be caused in bacteria by providing them with a particular DNA molecule.

However, other evidence was interpreted as suggesting that DNA was structurally uninteresting and possibly just a molecular scaffold for the apparently more interesting protein molecules. Crick was in the right place, in the right frame of mind, at the right time (1949), to join Max Perutz’s project at Cambridge University, and he began to work on the X-ray crystallography of proteins. X-ray crystallography theoretically offered the opportunity to reveal the molecular structure of large molecules like proteins and DNA, but there were serious technical problems then preventing X-ray crystallography from being applicable to such large molecules.

1949–1950

Crick taught himself the mathematical theory of X-ray crystallography. During the period of Crick's study of X-ray diffraction, researchers in the Cambridge lab were attempting to determine the most stable helical conformation of amino acid chains in proteins (the α helix). Linus Pauling was the first to identify the 3.6 amino acids per helix turn ratio of the α helix. Crick was witness to the kinds of errors that his co-workers made in their failed attempts to make a correct molecular model of the α helix; these turned out to be important lessons that could be applied, in the future, to the helical structure of DNA. For example, he learned the importance of the structural rigidity that double bonds confer on molecular structures which is relevant both to peptide bonds in proteins and the structure of nucleotides in DNA.

1951–1953: DNA structure

In 1951, together with William Cochran and Vladimir Vand, Crick assisted in the development of a mathematical theory of X-ray diffraction by a helical molecule. This theoretical result matched well with X-ray data obtained for proteins that contain sequences of amino acids in the Alpha helix conformation. Helical diffraction theory turned out to also be useful for understanding the structure of DNA.

Late in 1951, Crick started working with James D. Watson at Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, England. Using "Photo 51" (the X-ray diffraction results of Raymond Gosling and Rosalind Franklin of King's College London, given to them by Gosling and Franklin's colleague Maurice Wilkins), Watson and Crick together developed a model for a helical structure of DNA, which they published in 1953. For this and subsequent work they were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 with Maurice Wilkins.

When James Watson came to Cambridge, Crick was a 35-year-old graduate student (due to his work during WWII) and Watson was only 23, but he already had a Ph.D. They shared an interest in the fundamental problem of learning how genetic information might be stored in molecular form. Watson and Crick talked endlessly about DNA and the idea that it might be possible to guess a good molecular model of its structure. A key piece of experimentally-derived information came from X-ray diffraction images that had been obtained by Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, and their research student, Raymond Gosling. In November 1951, Wilkins came to Cambridge and shared his data with Watson and Crick. Alexander Stokes (another expert in helical diffraction theory) and Wilkins (both at King's College) had reached the conclusion that X-ray diffraction data for DNA indicated that the molecule had a helical structure—but Franklin vehemently disputed this conclusion. Stimulated by their discussions with Wilkins and what Watson learned by attending a talk given by Franklin about her work on DNA, Crick and Watson produced and showed off an erroneous first model of DNA. Their hurry to produce a model of DNA structure was driven in part by the knowledge that they were competing against Linus Pauling. Given Pauling's recent success in discovering the Alpha helix, they feared that Pauling might also be the first to determine the structure of DNA.

Many have speculated about what might have happened had Pauling been able to travel to Britain as planned in May 1952. He ''might'' have been invited to see some of the Wilkins/Franklin X-ray diffraction data, and such an event ''might'' have led him to a double helix model. As it was, his political activities caused his travel to be restricted by the U. S. government and he did not visit the UK until later, at which point he met none of the DNA researchers in England—but at any rate he was preoccupied with proteins at the time, not DNA. Watson and Crick were not officially working on DNA. Crick was writing his Ph.D. thesis; Watson also had other work such as trying to obtain crystals of myoglobin for X-ray diffraction experiments. In 1952, Watson did X-ray diffraction on tobacco mosaic virus and found results indicating that it had helical structure. Having failed once, Watson and Crick were now somewhat reluctant to try again and for a while they were forbidden to make further efforts to find a molecular model of DNA.

Of great importance to the model building effort of Watson and Crick was Rosalind Franklin's understanding of basic chemistry, which indicated that the hydrophilic phosphate-containing backbones of the nucleotide chains of DNA should be positioned so as to interact with water molecules on the outside of the molecule while the hydrophobic bases should be packed into the core. Franklin shared this chemical knowledge with Watson and Crick when she pointed out to them that their first model (from 1951, with the phosphates inside) was obviously wrong.

Crick described what he saw as the failure of Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin to cooperate and work towards finding a molecular model of DNA as a major reason why he and Watson eventually made a second attempt to do so. They asked for, and received, permission to do so from both William Lawrence Bragg and Wilkins. In order to construct their model of DNA, Watson and Crick made use of information from unpublished X-ray diffraction images of Franklin's (shown at meetings and freely shared by Wilkins), including preliminary accounts of Franklin's results/photographs of the X-ray images that were included in a written progress report for the King's College laboratory of Sir John Randall from late 1952.

It is a matter of debate whether Watson and Crick should have had access to Franklin's results without her knowledge or permission, and before she had a chance to formally publish the results of her detailed analysis of her X-ray diffraction data which were included in the progress report. However, Watson and Crick found fault in her steadfast assertion that, according to her data, a helical structure was not the only possible shape for DNA—so they had a dilemma. In an effort to clarify this issue, Max Ferdinand Perutz later published what had been in the progress report, and suggested that nothing was in the report that Franklin herself had not said in her talk (attended by Watson) in late 1951. Further, Perutz explained that the report was to a Medical Research Council (MRC) committee that had been created in order to "establish contact between the different groups of people working for the Council". Randall's and Perutz's laboratories were both funded by the MRC.

It is also not clear how important Franklin's unpublished results from the progress report actually were for the model-building done by Watson and Crick. After the first crude X-ray diffraction images of DNA were collected in the 1930s, William Astbury had talked about stacks of nucleotides spaced at 3.4 angström (0.34 nanometre) intervals in DNA. A citation to Astbury's earlier X-ray diffraction work was one of only eight references in Franklin's first paper on DNA. Analysis of Astbury's published DNA results and the better X-ray diffraction images collected by Wilkins and Franklin revealed the helical nature of DNA. It was possible to predict the number of bases stacked within a single turn of the DNA helix (10 per turn; a full turn of the helix is 27 angströms [2.7 nm] in the compact A form, 34 angströms [3.4 nm] in the wetter B form). Wilkins shared this information about the B form of DNA with Crick and Watson. Crick did not see Franklin's B form X-ray images (Photo 51) until after the DNA double helix model was published.

One of the few references cited by Watson and Crick when they published their model of DNA, was to a published article that included Sven Furberg's DNA model that had the bases on the inside. Thus, the Watson and Crick model was not the first "bases in" model to be published. Furberg's results had also provided the correct orientation of the DNA sugars with respect to the bases. During their model building, Crick and Watson learned that an anti-parallel orientation of the two nucleotide chain backbones worked best to orient the base pairs in the centre of a double helix. Crick's access to Franklin's progress report of late 1952 is what made Crick confident that DNA was a double helix with anti-parallel chains, but there were other chains of reasoning and sources of information that also led to these conclusions.

As a result of leaving King's College for another institution, Franklin was asked by John Randall to give up her work on DNA. When it became clear to Wilkins and the supervisors of Watson and Crick that Franklin was going to the new job, and that Linus Pauling was working on the structure of DNA, they were willing to share Franklin's data with Watson and Crick, in the hope that they could find a good model of DNA before Pauling was able. Franklin's X-ray diffraction data for DNA and her systematic analysis of DNA's structural features was useful to Watson and Crick in guiding them towards a correct molecular model. The key problem for Watson and Crick, which could not be resolved by the data from King's College, was to guess how the nucleotide bases pack into the core of the DNA double helix.

Another key to finding the correct structure of DNA was the so-called Chargaff ratios, experimentally determined ratios of the nucleotide subunits of DNA: the amount of guanine is equal to cytosine and the amount of adenine is equal to thymine. A visit by Erwin Chargaff to England in 1952 reinforced the salience of this important fact for Watson and Crick. The significance of these ratios for the structure of DNA were not recognized until Watson, persisting in building structural models, realized that A:T and C:G pairs are structurally similar. In particular, the length of each base pair is the same. The base pairs are held together by hydrogen bonds, the same non-covalent interaction that stabilizes the protein α-helix. Watson's recognition of the A:T and C:G pairs was aided by information from Jerry Donohue about the most likely structures of the nucleobases. After the discovery of the hydrogen bonded A:T and C:G pairs, Watson and Crick soon had their double helix model of DNA with the hydrogen bonds at the core of the helix providing a way to "unzip" the two complementary strands for easy replication: the last key requirement for a likely model of the genetic molecule. As important as Crick's contributions to the discovery of the double helical DNA model were, he stated that without the chance to collaborate with Watson, he would not have found the structure by himself.

Crick did tentatively attempt to perform some experiments on nucleotide base pairing, but he was more of a theoretical than an experimental biologist. There was another near-discovery of the base pairing rules in early 1952. Crick had started to think about interactions between the bases. He asked John Griffith to try to calculate attractive interactions between the DNA bases from chemical principles and quantum mechanics. Griffith's best guess was that A:T and G:C were attractive pairs. At that time, Crick was not aware of Chargaff's rules and he made little of Griffith's calculations, although it did start him thinking about complementary replication. Identification of the correct base-pairing rules (A-T, G-C) was achieved by Watson "playing" with cardboard cut-out models of the nucleotide bases, much in the manner that Linus Pauling had discovered the protein alpha helix a few years earlier. The Watson and Crick discovery of the DNA double helix structure was made possible by their willingness to combine theory, modeling and experimental results (albeit mostly done by others) to achieve their goal.

The DNA double helix structure proposed by Watson and Crick was based upon "Watson-Crick" bonds between the four bases most frequently found in DNA (A, C, T, G) and RNA (A, C, U, G). However, later research showed that triple-stranded, quadruple-stranded and other more complex DNA molecular structures required Hoogstein bonds. In addition, the entire field of synthetic biology began with researchers such as Erik T. Kool, where bases other than A, C, T and G are used in a synthetic DNA. In addition to synthetic DNA there are also attempts to construct synthetic codons, synthetic endonucleases, synthetic proteins and synthetic zinc fingers. Using synthetic DNA, instead of there being 4³ codons, if there are n new bases there could be as many as n³ codons. Research is currently being done to see if codons can be expanded to more than 3 bases. These new codons can code for new amino acids. These synthetic molecules can be used not only in medicine, but in creation of new materials.

The discovery was made on 28 February 1953; the first Watson/Crick paper appeared in Nature on 25 April 1953. Sir Lawrence Bragg, the director of the Cavendish Laboratory, where Watson and Crick worked, gave a talk at Guys Hospital Medical School in London on Thursday 14 May 1953 which resulted in an article by Ritchie Calder in The News Chronicle of London, on Friday 15 May 1953, entitled "Why You Are You. Nearer Secret of Life." The news reached readers of The New York Times the next day; Victor K. McElheny, in researching his biography, "Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution", found a clipping of a six-paragraph New York Times article written from London and dated 16 May 1953 with the headline "Form of `Life Unit' in Cell Is Scanned." The article ran in an early edition and was then pulled to make space for news deemed more important. (The New York Times subsequently ran a longer article on 12 June 1953). The Cambridge University undergraduate newspaper ''Varsity'' also ran its own short article on the discovery on Saturday 30 May 1953. Bragg's original announcement of the discovery at a Solvay conference on proteins in Belgium on 8 April 1953 went unreported by the British press.

Sydney Brenner, Jack Dunitz, Dorothy Hodgkin, Leslie Orgel, and Beryl M. Oughton, were some of the first people in April 1953 to see the model of the structure of DNA, constructed by Crick and Watson; at the time they were working at Oxford University's Chemistry Department. All were impressed by the new DNA model, especially Brenner who subsequently worked with Crick at Cambridge in the Cavendish Laboratory and the new Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Orgel also later worked with Crick at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

Molecular biology

In 1954, at the age of 37, Crick completed his Ph.D. thesis: "X-Ray Diffraction: Polypeptides and Proteins" and received his degree. Crick then worked in the laboratory of David Harker at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, where he continued to develop his skills in the analysis of X-ray diffraction data for proteins, working primarily on ribonuclease and the mechanisms of protein synthesis. David Harker, the American X-ray crystallographer, was described as "the John Wayne of crystallography" by Vittorio Luzzati, a crystallographer at the Centre for Molecular Genetics in Gif-sur-Yvette near Paris, who had worked with Rosalind Franklin.

After the discovery of the double helix model of DNA, Crick's interests quickly turned to the biological implications of the structure. In 1953, Watson and Crick published another article in ''Nature'' which stated: "it therefore seems likely that the precise sequence of the bases is the code that carries the genetical information".

In 1956, Crick and Watson speculated on the structure of small viruses. They suggested that spherical viruses such as Tomato bushy stunt virus had icosahedral symmetry and were made from 60 identical subunits.

After his short time in New York, Crick returned to Cambridge where he worked until 1976, at which time he moved to California. Crick engaged in several X-ray diffraction collaborations such as one with Alexander Rich on the structure of collagen. However, Crick was quickly drifting away from continued work related to his expertise in the interpretation of X-ray diffraction patterns of proteins.

George Gamow established a group of scientists interested in the role of RNA as an intermediary between DNA as the genetic storage molecule in the nucleus of cells and the synthesis of proteins in the cytoplasm (the RNA Tie Club). It was clear to Crick that there had to be a code by which a short sequence of nucleotides would specify a particular amino acid in a newly synthesized protein. In 1956, Crick wrote an informal paper about the genetic coding problem for the small group of scientists in Gamow's RNA group. In this article, Crick reviewed the evidence supporting the idea that there was a common set of about 20 amino acids used to synthesize proteins. Crick proposed that there was a corresponding set of small "adaptor molecules" that would hydrogen bond to short sequences of a nucleic acid, and also link to one of the amino acids. He also explored the many theoretical possibilities by which short nucleic acid sequences might code for the 20 amino acids.

During the mid-to-late 1950s Crick was very much intellectually engaged in sorting out the mystery of how proteins are synthesized. By 1958, Crick's thinking had matured and he could list in an orderly way all of the key features of the protein synthesis process:

genetic information stored in the sequence of DNA molecules

a "messenger" RNA molecule to carry the instructions for making one protein to the cytoplasm

adaptor molecules ("they might contain nucleotides") to match short sequences of nucleotides in the RNA messenger molecules to specific amino acids

ribonucleic-protein complexes that catalyse the assembly of amino acids into proteins according to the messenger RNA

The adaptor molecules were eventually shown to be tRNAs and the catalytic "ribonucleic-protein complexes" became known as ribosomes. An important step was later realization (in 1960) that the messenger RNA was not the same as the ribosomal RNA. None of this, however, answered the fundamental theoretical question of the exact nature of the genetic code. In his 1958 article, Crick speculated, as had others, that a triplet of nucleotides could code for an amino acid. Such a code might be "degenerate", with 4×4×4=64 possible triplets of the four nucleotide subunits while there were only 20 amino acids. Some amino acids might have multiple triplet codes. Crick also explored other codes in which, for various reasons, only some of the triplets were used, "magically" producing just the 20 needed combinations. Experimental results were needed; theory alone could not decide the nature of the code. Crick also used the term "central dogma" to summarize an idea that implies that genetic information flow between macromolecules would be essentially one-way:

:DNA → RNA → Protein

Some critics thought that by using the word "dogma", Crick was implying that this was a rule that could not be questioned, but all he really meant was that it was a compelling idea without much solid evidence to support it. In his thinking about the biological processes linking DNA genes to proteins, Crick made explicit the distinction between the materials involved, the energy required, and the information flow. Crick was focused on this third component (information) and it became the organizing principle of what became known as molecular biology. Crick had by this time become a highly influential theoretical molecular biologist.

Proof that the genetic code is a degenerate triplet code finally came from genetics experiments, some of which were performed by Crick. The details of the code came mostly from work by Marshall Nirenberg and others who synthesized synthetic RNA molecules and used them as templates for ''in vitro'' protein synthesis.

Controversy about using King's College London's results

An enduring controversy has been generated by Watson and Crick's use of DNA X-ray diffraction data collected by Rosalind Franklin and her student Raymond Gosling. The controversy arose from the fact that some of these data were shown to them, without her knowledge, by Maurice Wilkins and Max Perutz. Her experimental results provided estimates of the water content of DNA crystals, and these results were most consistent with the three sugar-phosphate backbones being on the outside of the molecule. Franklin personally told Crick and Watson that the backbones had to be on the outside, whilst vehemently stating that her data did not force one to conclude that DNA has a helical structure. Her identification of the space group for DNA crystals revealed to Crick that the DNA strands were antiparallel, which helped Watson and Crick decide to look for DNA models with two antiparallel polynucleotide strands. The X-ray diffraction images collected by Franklin provided the best evidence for the helical nature of DNA—something she recognized as well as Watson and Crick according to a book by Anne Sayre. Franklin's experimental work proved important in Crick and Watson's development of the correct model.

Prior to publication of the double helix structure, Watson and Crick had little interaction with Franklin. Crick and Watson felt that they had benefited from collaborating with Maurice Wilkins. They offered him a co-authorship on the article that first described the double helix structure of DNA. Wilkins turned down the offer, and was in part responsible for the terse character of the acknowledgment of experimental work done at King's College London. Rather than make any of the DNA researchers at King's College co-authors on the Watson and Crick double helix article, the solution was to publish two additional papers from King's College along with the helix paper. Brenda Maddox suggested that because of the importance of her experimental results in Watson and Crick's model building and theoretical analysis, Franklin should have had her name on the original Watson and Crick paper in ''Nature''. Franklin and Gosling submitted their own joint 'second' paper to ''Nature'' at the same time as Wilkins, Stokes, and Wilson submitted theirs (i.e. the 'third' paper on DNA).

Views on religion

Crick once joked, "Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children."

In his book ''Of Molecules and Men'', Crick expressed his views on the relationship between science and religion. After suggesting that it would become possible for people to wonder if a computer might be programmed so as to have a soul, he wondered: at what point during biological evolution did the first organism have a soul? At what moment does a baby get a soul? Crick stated his view that the idea of a non-material soul that could enter a body and then persist after death is just that, an imagined idea. For Crick, the mind is a product of physical brain activity and the brain had evolved by natural means over millions of years. Crick felt that it was important that evolution by natural selection be taught in schools and that it was regrettable that English schools had compulsory religious instruction. Crick felt that a new scientific world view was rapidly being established, and predicted that once the detailed workings of the brain were eventually revealed, erroneous Christian concepts about the nature of humans and the world would no longer be tenable; traditional conceptions of the "soul" would be replaced by a new understanding of the physical basis of mind. He was sceptical of organized religion, referring to himself as a sceptic and an agnostic with "a strong inclination towards atheism".

In 1960, Crick accepted a fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge, one factor being that the new college did not have a chapel. Sometime later a large donation was made to establish a chapel and the fellowship elected to accept it. Crick resigned his fellowship in protest.

In October 1969, Crick participated in a celebration of the 100th year of the journal ''Nature''. Crick attempted to make some predictions about what the next 30 years would hold for molecular biology. His speculations were later published in ''Nature''. Near the end of the article, Crick briefly mentioned the search for life on other planets, but he held little hope that extraterrestrial life would be found by the year 2000. He also discussed what he described as a possible new direction for research, what he called "biochemical theology". Crick wrote, "So many people pray that one finds it hard to believe that they do not get some satisfaction from it".

Crick suggested that it might be possible to find chemical changes in the brain that were molecular correlates of the act of prayer. He speculated that there might be a detectable change in the level of some neurotransmitter or neurohormone when people pray. Crick may have been imagining substances such as dopamine that are released by the brain under certain conditions and produce rewarding sensations. Crick's suggestion that there might someday be a new science of "biochemical theology" seems to have been realized under an alternative name: there is now the new field of neurotheology. Crick's view of the relationship between science and religion continued to play a role in his work as he made the transition from molecular biology research into theoretical neuroscience.

He asked in 1998, "And if some of the Bible is manifestly wrong, why should any of the rest of it be accepted automatically? ... And what would be more important than to find our true place in the universe by removing one by one these unfortunate vestiges of earlier beliefs?" (What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery)

Directed panspermia

During the 1960s, Crick became concerned with the origins of the genetic code. In 1966, Crick took the place of Leslie Orgel at a meeting where Orgel was to talk about the origin of life. Crick speculated about possible stages by which an initially simple code with a few amino acid types might have evolved into the more complex code used by existing organisms. At that time, everyone thought of proteins as the only kind of enzymes and ribozymes had not yet been found. Many molecular biologists were puzzled by the problem of the origin of a protein replicating system that is as complex as that which exists in organisms currently inhabiting Earth. In the early 1970s, Crick and Orgel further speculated about the possibility that the production of living systems from molecules may have been a very rare event in the universe, but once it had developed it could be spread by intelligent life forms using space travel technology, a process they called “Directed Panspermia”. In a retrospective article, Crick and Orgel noted that they had been overly pessimistic about the chances of abiogenesis on Earth when they had assumed that some kind of self-replicating protein system was the molecular origin of life.

Crick addressed the Origin of Protein Synthesis in a paper with Sydney Brenner, Aaron Klug, and George Pieczenik. In this paper, based on Pieczenik's work, they speculate that code constraints on nucleotide sequences allow protein synthesis without the need for a ribosome. It, however, requires a five base binding between the mRNA and tRNA with a flip of the anti-codon creating a triplet coding, even though it is a five base physical interaction. Thomas H. Jukes pointed out that the code constraints on the mRNA sequence required for this translation mechanism is still preserved.

Neuroscience, other interests

Crick's period at Cambridge was the pinnacle of his long scientific career, but he left Cambridge in 1977 after 30 years, having been offered (and having refused) the Mastership of Gonville & Caius. James Watson claimed at a Cambridge conference marking the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA in 2003: "Now perhaps it's a pretty well kept secret that one of the most uninspiring acts of Cambridge University over this past century was to turn down Francis Crick when he applied to be the Professor of Genetics, in 1958. Now there may have been a series of arguments, which lead them to reject Francis. It was really saying, don't push us to the frontier." The apparently "pretty well kept secret" had already been recorded in Soraya De Chadarevian's "Designs For Life: Molecular Biology After World War II", published by CUP in 2002. His major contribution to molecular biology in Cambridge is well documented in The History of the University of Cambridge: Volume 4 (1870 to 1990), which was published by Cambridge University Press in 1992.

According to the University of Cambridge's genetics department official website, the electors of the professorship could not reach consensus, prompting the intervention of then University Vice-Chancellor Lord Adrian. Lord Adrian first offered the professorship to a compromise candidate, Guido Pontecorvo, who refused, and is said to have offered it then to Crick, who also refused.

In 1976, Crick took a sabbatical year at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. Crick had been a nonresident fellow of the Institute since 1960. Crick wrote, "I felt at home in Southern California." After the sabbatical, Crick left Cambridge in order to continue working at the Salk Institute. He was also a professor at the University of California, San Diego. He taught himself neuroanatomy and studied many other areas of neuroscience research. It took him several years to disengage from molecular biology because exciting discoveries continued to be made, including the discovery of alternative splicing and the discovery of restriction enzymes, which helped make possible genetic engineering. Eventually, in the 1980s, Crick was able to devote his full attention to his other interest, consciousness. His autobiographical book, ''What Mad Pursuit'', includes a description of why he left molecular biology and switched to neuroscience.

Upon taking up work in theoretical neuroscience, Crick was struck by several things:

there were many isolated subdisciplines within neuroscience with little contact between them

many people who were interested in behaviour treated the brain as a black box

consciousness was viewed as a taboo subject by many neurobiologists

Crick hoped he might aid progress in neuroscience by promoting constructive interactions between specialists from the many different subdisciplines concerned with consciousness. He even collaborated with neurophilosophers such as Patricia Churchland. In 1983, as a result of their studies of computer models of neural networks, Crick and Mitchison proposed that the function of REM sleep is to remove certain modes of interactions in networks of cells in the mammalian cerebral cortex; they called this hypothetical process 'reverse learning' or 'unlearning'. In the final phase of his career, Crick established a collaboration with Christof Koch that lead to publication of a series of articles on consciousness during the period spanning from 1990 to 2005. Crick made the strategic decision to focus his theoretical investigation of consciousness on how the brain generates visual awareness within a few hundred milliseconds of viewing a scene. Crick and Koch proposed that consciousness seems so mysterious because it involves very short-term memory processes that are as yet poorly understood. Crick also published a book describing how neurobiology had reached a mature enough stage so that consciousness could be the subject of a unified effort to study it at the molecular, cellular and behavioural levels. Crick's book ''The Astonishing Hypothesis'' made the argument that neuroscience now had the tools required to begin a scientific study of how brains produce conscious experiences. Crick was skeptical about the value of computational models of mental function that are not based on details about brain structure and function.

Reactions to Crick and his work

Crick has widely been described as talkative, brash, and lacking modesty. His personality combined with his scientific accomplishments produced many opportunities for Crick to stimulate reactions from others, both inside and outside of the scientific world, which was the centre of his intellectual and professional life. Crick spoke rapidly, and rather loudly, and had an infectious and reverberating laugh, and a lively sense of humour. One colleague from the Salk Institute described him as "a brainstorming intellectual powerhouse with a mischievous smile.... Francis was never mean-spirited, just incisive. He detected microscopic flaws in logic. In a room full of smart scientists, Francis continually reearned his position as the heavyweight champ."

Eugenics

Crick occasionally expressed his views on eugenics, usually in private letters. For example, Crick advocated a form of positive eugenics in which wealthy parents would be encouraged to have more children. He once remarked, "In the long run, it is unavoidable that society will begin to worry about the character of the next generation... It is not a subject at the moment which we can tackle easily because people have so many religious beliefs and until we have a more uniform view of ourselves I think it would be risky to try and do anything in the way of eugenics... I would be astonished if, in the next 100 or 200 years, society did not come round to the view that they would have to try to improve the next generation in some extent or one way or another."

Creationism

It has been suggested by some observers that Crick's speculation about panspermia "fits neatly into the intelligent design concept." Crick's name was raised in this context in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial over the teaching of intelligent design. Crick was, however, a firm critic of Young Earth creationism. In the 1987 United States Supreme Court case Edwards v. Aguillard, Crick joined a group of other Nobel laureates who advised that, "'Creation-science' simply has no place in the public-school science classroom." Crick was also an advocate for the establishment of Darwin Day as a British national holiday.

Recognition

In addition to his third share of the 1962 Nobel prize for Physiology or Medicine, he received many awards and honours, including the Royal and Copley medals of the Royal Society (1972 and 1975), and also the Order of Merit (on 27 November 1991); he refused an offer of a CBE in 1963 and later refused an offer of a knighthood, but was often referred to in error as 'Sir Francis Crick' and even on occasions as 'Lord Crick.'

The award of Nobel prizes to John Kendrew and Max Perutz, and to Crick, Watson, and Wilkins was satirised in a short sketch in the BBC TV programme That Was The Week That Was with the Nobel Prizes being referred to as 'The Alfred Nobel Peace Pools.'

The Francis Crick Prize Lectures at The Royal Society, London

The Francis Crick Lecture was established in 2003 following an endowment by his former colleague, Sydney Brenner, joint winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. The lecture is delivered annually in any field of biological sciences, with preference given to the areas in which Francis Crick himself worked. Importantly, the lectureship is aimed at younger scientists, ideally under 40, or whose career progression corresponds to this age.

The Francis Crick Institute

The Francis Crick Institute is a planned £660,000,000 biomedical research centre to be located in London, United Kingdom. The Francis Crick Institute is a partnership between Cancer Research UK, Imperial College London, King's College London, the Medical Research Council, University College London (UCL) and the Wellcome Trust. Once completed in 2015, it will be the biggest centre for biomedical research and innovation in Europe.

The Francis Crick Graduate Lectures at the University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge Graduate School of Biological, Medical and Veterinary Sciences hosts The Francis Crick Graduate Lectures. The first two lectures were by John Gurdon and Tim Hunt.

Other Honors

The inscription on the helices of a DNA sculpture (which was donated by James Watson) outside Clare College's Thirkill Court, Cambridge, England reads: '' "The structure of DNA was discovered in 1953 by Francis Crick and James Watson while Watson lived here at Clare." '' and on the base: ''"The double helix model was supported by the work of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins."''

Another sculpture entitled ''Discovery'', was installed on Tuesday, 13 December 2005 in Abington Street, Northampton. According to the late Mr Lynn Wilson, chairman of the Wilson Foundation, "The sculpture celebrates the life of a world class scientist who must surely be considered the greatest Northamptonian of all time — by discovering DNA he unlocked the whole future of genetics and the alphabet of life."

Westminster City Council unveiled a green plaque to Francis Crick on the front façade of 56 St George's Square, Pimlico, London SW1 on 20 June 2007; Crick lived in the first floor flat, together with Robert Dougall of BBC radio and later TV fame, a former Royal Navy associate.

In addition, Crick was a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the International Academy of Humanism, and a Fellow of CSICOP.

A sculpted bust of Francis Crick by John Sherrill Houser, which incorporates the DNA Double Helix, is currently nearing completion in the artist's studio in New Mexico, USA for possible display in Cambridge.

Books by Francis Crick

''Of Molecules and Men'' (Prometheus Books, 2004; original edition 1967) ISBN 1-59102-185-5

''Life Itself'' (Simon & Schuster, 1981) ISBN 0-671-25562-2

''What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery'' (Basic Books reprint edition, 1990) ISBN 0-465-09138-5

''The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search For The Soul'' (Scribner reprint edition, 1995) ISBN 0-684-80158-2

Kreiseliana: about and around Georg Kreisel; ISBN 1-56881-061-X; 495 pages. For pages 25 – 32 "Georg Kreisel: a Few Personal Recollections" contributed by Francis Crick.

Books with references to Francis Crick and the structure of DNA discovery

John Bankston, Francis Crick and James D. Watson; ''Francis Crick and James Watson: Pioneers in DNA Research'' (Mitchell Lane Publishers, Inc., 2002) ISBN 1-58415-122-6.

Bill Bryson; ''A Short History of Nearly Everything'' (Broadway Books, 2003) ISBN 0-7679-0817-1.

Soraya De Chadarevian; ''Designs For Life: Molecular Biology After World War II'', CUP 2002, 444 pp; ISBN 0-521-57078-6.

Roderick Braithwaite. ""'Strikingly Alive', The History of the Mill Hill School Foundation 1807-2007; published Phillimore & Co. ISBN 9781860773303

Edwin Chargaff; ''Heraclitean Fire'', Rockefeller Press, 1978.

S. Chomet (Ed.), "''D.N.A. Genesis of a Discovery''", 1994, Newman- Hemisphere Press, London

Dickerson, Richard E.; "''Present at the Flood: How Structural Molecular Biology Came About''", Sinauer, 2005; ISBN 0-878-93168-6.

Edward Edelson, "''Francis Crick And James Watson: And the Building Blocks of Life''"' Oxford University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-19-513971-2.

John Finch; 'A Nobel Fellow On Every Floor', Medical Research Council 2008, 381 pp, ISBN 978-1840469-40-0.

Hager, Thomas; "''Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling''", Simon & Schuster 1995; ISBN 0-684-80909-5

Graeme Hunter; ''Light Is A Messenger, the life and science of William Lawrence Bragg'' (Oxford University Press, 2004) ISBN 0-19-852921-X.

Horace Freeland Judson, ''"The Eighth Day of Creation. Makers of the Revolution in Biology''"; Penguin Books 1995, first published by Jonathan Cape, 1977; ISBN 0-14-017800-7.

Errol C. Friedberg; "Sydney Brenner: A Biography", pub. CSHL Press October 2010, ISBN 0879699477.

Torsten Krude (Ed.); ''DNA Changing Science and Society'' (ISBN 0-521-82378-1) CUP 2003. (The Darwin Lectures for 2003, including one by Sir Aaron Klug on Rosalind Franklin's involvement in the determination of the structure of DNA).

Brenda Maddox ''Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA'', 2002. ISBN 0-00-655211-0.

Robert Olby; ''The Path to The Double Helix: Discovery of DNA''; first published in October 1974 by MacMillan, with foreword by Francis Crick; ISBN 0-486-68117-3; revised in 1994, with a 9-page postscript.

Robert Olby; Oxford National Dictionary article: ‘Crick, Francis Harry Compton (1916–2004)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, January 2008.

Robert Olby; "Francis Crick: Hunter of Life's Secrets", Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, ISBN 978-087969798-3, published on 25 August 2009.

Matt Ridley; ''Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code (Eminent Lives)'' first published in June 2006 in the USA and then in the UK September 2006, by HarperCollins Publishers; 192 pp, ISBN 0-06-082333-X.

Anne Sayre. 1975. ''Rosalind Franklin and DNA''. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. ISBN 0-393-32044-8.

James D. Watson; ''The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA'', Atheneum, 1980, ISBN 0-689-70602-2 (first published in 1968) is a very readable firsthand account of the research by Crick and Watson. The book also formed the basis of the award winning television dramatization ''Life Story'' by BBC Horizon (also broadcast as ''Race for the Double Helix'').

James D. Watson; ''The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA''; The Norton Critical Edition, which was published in 1980, edited by Gunther S. Stent: ISBN 0-393-01245-X.

James D. Watson; "Avoid boring people and other lessons from a life in science" New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-375-41284-4, 366pp.

Maurice Wilkins; ''The Third Man of the Double Helix: The Autobiography of Maurice Wilkins'' ISBN 0-19-860665-6.

See also

History of RNA biology

List of RNA biologists

Neural correlates of consciousness

Molecular structure of Nucleic Acids

Crick's wobble hypothesis

Crick, Brenner et al. experiment

Reverse learning

References

External links

Crick papers

Register of Francis Crick Personal Papers – MSS 660 Crick's personal papers at Mandeville Special Collections Library, Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego

Francis Crick Archive — Papers by Francis Crick are available for study at the Wellcome Library’s Archives and Manuscripts department. These papers include those dealing with Crick’s career after he moved to the Salk Institute in San Diego. The Crick papers

Comprehensive list of pdf files of Crick's papers from 1950 to 1990 – National Library of Medicine.

Francis Crick papers – ''Nature.com''

http://www.intuition.org/txt/crick2.htm for Crick's comments on LSD

Manuscripts and Correspondence – Mark Bretscher Discovery of Crick's original scientific material in Cambridge, England.

Key Participants: Francis H. C. Crick – ''Linus Pauling and the Race for DNA: A Documentary History''

Hear or see Crick

An interview with Francis Crick and Christof Koch, 2001

Listen to Francis Crick

Presentation speech at the Nobel Prize ceremony in 1962.

''The Quest for Consciousness'' – ''The Quest for Consciousness'' – 65 minute audio program — a conversation on Consciousness with neurobiologist Francis Crick of the Salk Institute and neurobiologist Christof Koch from Caltech.

Listen to Francis Crick and James Watson talking on the BBC in 1962, 1972, and 1974.

The Impact of Linus Pauling on Molecular Biology – a 1995 talk delivered by Crick at Oregon State University

About his work

The Crick Papers at the Wellcome Trust.

"Quiet debut for the double helix" by Professor Robert Olby, ''Nature'' 421 (23 January 2003): 402-405.

Reading list for discovery of DNA story from the National Centre for Biotechnology Education.

About his life

Olby's Australian lecture, March 2010

Salk Institute Press Release on the death of Francis Crick.

BBC News: Francis Crick dies aged 88

Francis Crick (Archived 2009-10-31) – MSN Encarta

The Francis Crick Papers - Profiles in Science, National Library of Medicine

Miscellaneous

National DNA Day, 25 April 2006 Moderated Chat Transcript Archive

Obituary in "The Times" (London) of Francis Crick, 30 July 2004.

Independent On Line article about Consciousness, 7 June 2006.

Francis Crick Obituary ''The Biochemist''

Obituary: Francis H. C. Crick (1916-2004) by David M. Eagleman, in ''Vision Research''

100 Scientists and Thinkers: James Watson and Francis Crick from TIME magazine.

Francis Crick: Nobel Prize 1962, Physiology or Medicine

Associated Press story on the death of Francis Crick

First press stories on DNA but for the 'second' DNA story in ''The New York Times'', see: http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/science/dna-article.pdf — for reproduction of the original text in June 1953.

'Death' of DNA Helix (Crystalline) joke funeral card.

Lynne Elkins' article on Franklin.

50th anniversary series of articles -from ''The New York Times''.

Quotes of Robert Olby on exactly who ''may'' have discovered the structure of DNA.

listen to Matt Ridley talking about Francis Crick.

A celebration of Francis Crick's life in science.

Francis Crick telling his life story at Web of Stories

Odile Crick's page (with music!) on the Crick family web site.

Article by Mark Steyn from The Atlantic in 2004.

Review of "Francis Crick: Hunter of Life's Secrets" in 'Current Biology'.

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Coordinates	40°37′29″N73°57′8″N
Name	Maurice Wilkins
Birth date	December 15, 1916
Birth place	Pongaroa, Wairarapa, New Zealand
Death date	October 05, 2004
Death place	Blackheath, London, United Kingdom
Fields	Physics, Molecular biology
Work institution	University of California, Berkeley
Known for	X-ray diffraction, DNA
Prizes	Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1962)
Footnotes	}}

Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins CBE FRS (15 December 1916 – 5 October 2004) was a New Zealand-born English physicist and molecular biologist, and Nobel Laureate whose research contributed to the scientific understanding of phosphorescence, isotope separation, optical microscopy and X-ray diffraction, and to the development of radar. He is best known for his work at King's College London on the structure of DNA. In recognition of this work, he, Francis Crick and James Watson were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material." His autobiography provides extensive information on the topics mentioned here.

Birth and early education

Wilkins was born in Pongaroa, north Wairarapa, New Zealand where his father, Edgar Henry Wilkins was a medical doctor. His family had come from Dublin, where his paternal and maternal grandfathers were, respectively, Headmaster of Dublin High School and a Chief of Police. The Wilkins moved to Birmingham, England when Maurice was 6. Later, he attended Wylde Green College and then went to King Edward's School from 1929 to 1935.

Academic career, 1936--1950

Wilkins went up to St John's College, Cambridge in 1935. He studied physics, within the Natural Sciences Tripos, and received a B.A. Mark Oliphant who was one of Wilkin's tutors at St. John's had been appointed to the Chair of Physics at the University of Birmingham, and had appointed John Randall to his staff. Wilkins became a Ph.D. student of Randall. In 1945, they published three papers in the Proceedings of the Royal Society on phosphorescence and electron traps. Wilkins received Ph.D. for this work.

During World War II Wilkins developed improved radar screens at Birmingham, then worked on isotope separation at the Manhattan Project at the University of California, Berkeley during the years 1944-45.

Meanwhile, Randall had been appointed to the Chair of Physics at St. Andrews University. In 1945, he appointed Wilkins as Assistant Lecturer in his department. Randall was negotiating with the Medical Research Council (MRC) to set up a laboratory to apply the experimental methods of physics to problems of biology. The combination of these disciplines as biophysics was a novel idea. The MRC told Randall that this had to be done in another university. In 1946 Randall was appointed Wheatstone Professor of Physics, in charge of the entire Physics department at King's College, London, with the funding to set up a Biophysics Unit. He brought Wilkins with him, as Assistant Director of the unit. They appointed a team of scientists trained in both the physical and biological sciences. The "management philosophy" was to explore the use of many techniques in parallel, to find which looked promising, and then to focus on these. Wilkins, as the scientist with most diverse experience of physics and Assistant Director of the unit, had general oversight of the varied projects besides direct involvement in his personal research projects that included optical microscopy.

King's College received funding to build completely new Physics and Engineering Departments where vaults beneath the Strand level College forecourt had been destroyed by bombs during the War. The Biophysics Unit, several more experimental physics groups and the theoretical group started to move in, during the early months of 1952. The laboratories were opened formally by Lord Cherwell on June 27. Wilkins' article for ''Nature'' described both departments, consistent with his leadership role and prestige within the College at large.

DNA

By 1950, preliminary studies of proteins were progressing in the MRC unit. Randall's original plan for Rosalind Franklin was that she do X-ray diffraction studies on proteins. Wilkins' work on DNA changed that. By 1951, Randall had established a major effort to solve the structure of collagen and Wilkins and Franklin represented a parallel effort to determine the structure of DNA. In the meantime, Maurice Wilkins' friend Francis Crick had joined forces with James Watson under the supervision of Max Perutz at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge and under the overall direction of Lawrence Bragg.

At King's College Wilkins pursued, among other things x-ray diffraction work on DNA that had been obtained from calf thymus by the Swiss scientist Rudolf Signer. The DNA from Signer's lab was much more intact than the DNA which had previously been isolated. Wilkins discovered that it was possible to produce thin threads from this concentrated DNA solution that contained highly ordered arrays of DNA suitable for the production of x-ray diffraction patterns. Using a carefully bundled group of these DNA threads and keeping them hydrated, Wilkins and a graduate student Raymond Gosling obtained x-ray photographs of DNA that showed that the long, thin DNA molecule in the sample from Signer had a regular, crystal-like structure in these threads. This initial x-ray diffraction work at Kings College was done in May or June 1950. It was one of the x-ray diffraction photographs taken in 1950, shown at a meeting in Naples a year later, that sparked James Watson’s interest in DNA.

At that time Wilkins also introduced Francis Crick to the importance of DNA. Wilkins knew that proper experiments on the threads of purified DNA would require better x-ray equipment. Wilkins ordered a new x-ray tube and a new microcamera. Before the DNA sample from Signer was available, Gosling had been trying to make x-ray diffraction images of sperm. However, Franklin did not start using the new equipment until September 1951. By the summer of 1950 Randall had arranged for a three year research fellowship that would fund Rosalind Franklin in his laboratory. Franklin was delayed in finishing her work in Paris. Late in 1950, Randall wrote to Franklin to inform her that rather than work on protein, she should take advantage of Wilkins's preliminary work and that she should do x-ray studies of DNA fibers made from Signer's samples of DNA. Early in 1951 Franklin finally arrived. Wilkins was away on holiday and missed an initial meeting at which Raymond Gosling stood in for him along with Alex Stokes, who, like Crick, would solve the basic mathematics that make possible a general theory of how helical structures diffract x-rays. No work had been done on DNA in the laboratory for several months; the new x-ray tube sat unused, waiting for Franklin. Franklin ended up with the DNA from Signer, Gosling became her PhD student, and she had the expectation that DNA x-ray diffraction work was her project. Wilkins returned to the laboratory expecting that Franklin would be his collaborator and that they would work together on the DNA project that he had started. Franklin felt that DNA was now her project and would not collaborate with Wilkins, who then pursued parallel studies.

By November 1951 Wilkins had evidence that DNA in cells as well as purified DNA had a helical structure. Alex Stokes had solved the basic mathematics of helical diffraction theory and thought that Wilkins's x-ray diffraction data indicated a helical structure in DNA. Wilkins met with Watson and Crick and told them about his results. This information from Wilkins, along with additional information gained by Watson when he heard Franklin talk about her research during a King's College research meeting, stimulated Watson and Crick to create their first molecular model of DNA, a model with the phosphate backbones at the center. Upon viewing the model of the proposed structure, Franklin told Watson and Crick that it was wrong. Franklin knew from basic chemical principles the hydrophilic backbones should go on the outside of the molecule where they could interact with water. Crick tried to get Wilkins to continue with additional molecular modeling efforts, but Wilkins did not take this approach. During 1952, Franklin also refused to participate in molecular modeling efforts and continued to work on step-by-step detailed analysis of her x-ray diffraction data (Patterson synthesis). By the spring of 1952, Franklin had received permission from Randall to ask to transfer her fellowship so that she could leave King's College and work in John Bernal's laboratory at Birkbeck College, also in London. However, Franklin remained at King's College for another year.

By early 1953, it was clear that Franklin would simply drop her DNA work at the end of her fellowship that summer, or even sooner due to illness. Linus Pauling had published a proposed but incorrect structure of DNA, making the same basic error that Watson and Crick had made a year earlier. Some of those working on DNA in the United Kingdom feared that Pauling would quickly solve the DNA structure once he recognized his error and put the backbones of the nucleotide chains on the outside of a model of DNA. After March 1952 Franklin concentrated on the x-ray data for the A-form of less hydrated DNA while Wilkins tried to work on the hydrated B-form. Wilkins was handicapped because Franklin had all of the good DNA. Wilkins got new DNA samples, but it was not as good as the original sample he had used in 1950 and which Franklin continued to use. Most of his new results were for biological samples like sperm cells, which seemed to also suggest a helical structure for DNA. In the middle of 1952 Wilkins had for a time abandoned further DNA work when Franklin reported to him that her results made her doubt the helical nature of the A-form. Wilkins feared that the data suggesting a helical structure might just be an artifact.

In early 1953 Watson visited King's College and Wilkins showed him a high quality image of the B-form x-ray diffraction pattern, now identified as photograph 51, that Franklin had produced in March 1952. With the knowledge that Pauling was working on DNA and had submitted a model of DNA for publication, Watson and Crick mounted one more concentrated effort to deduce the structure of DNA. Through Max Perutz, his thesis supervisor, Crick gained access to a progress report from King's College that included useful information from Franklin about the features of DNA she had deduced from her x-ray diffraction data. Watson and Crick published their proposed DNA double helical structure in a paper in the journal ''Nature'' in April 1953. In this paper Watson and Crick acknowledged that they had been "stimulated by.... the unpublished results and ideas" of Wilkins and Franklin.

The first Watson-Crick paper appeared in ''Nature'' on 25 April 1953. Sir Lawrence Bragg, the director of the Cavendish Laboratory, where Watson and Crick worked, gave a talk at Guys Hospital Medical School in London on Thursday 14 May 1953 which resulted in an article by Ritchie Calder in the ''News Chronicle'' of London, on Friday 15 May 1953, entitled "Why You Are You. Nearer Secret of Life." The news reached readers of ''The New York Times'' the next day; Victor K. McElheny, in researching his biography of Watson, ''Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution'', found a clipping of a six-paragraph ''New York Times'' article written from London and dated 16 May 1953 with the headline "Form of 'Life Unit' in Cell Is Scanned." The article ran in an early edition and was then pulled to make space for news deemed more important. (The ''New York Times'' subsequently ran a longer article on 12 June 1953). The Cambridge University undergraduate newspaper ''Varsity'' also ran its own short article on the discovery on Saturday 30 May 1953. Bragg's original announcement at a Solvay conference on proteins in Belgium on 8 April 1953 went unreported by the press.

The members of the Cambridge and King's College laboratories agreed to report their interlocking work in three papers with continuous pagination in ''Nature''. Wilkins then led the team that performed a range of meticulous experiments to establish the helical model rigorously.

Personal life

Wilkins married an art student, Ruth, when he was at Berkeley. They had a son. He married his second wife Patricia Ann Chidgey in 1959. They had four children, Sarah, George, Emily and William.

He published his autobiography, ''The Third Man of the Double Helix'', in 2003.

Formerly classified UK security service papers reveal that, while working on the project, Wilkins came under suspicion of leaking atomic secrets. The files, released in August 2010, indicate surveillance of Wilkins ended by 1953. "After the war I wondered what I would do, as I was very disgusted with the dropping of two bombs on civilian centres in Japan," he told Britain's ''Encounter'' radio programme in 1999.

Recognition

In 1960 he was presented with the American Public Health Association's Albert Lasker Award, and in 1962 he was made a Commander of the British Empire. Also in 1962 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Watson and Crick for the discovery of the structure of DNA.

On Saturday 20 October 1962 the award of Nobel prizes to John Kendrew and Max Perutz, and to Crick, Watson, and Wilkins was satirised in a short sketch in the BBC TV programme ''That Was The Week That Was'' with the Nobel Prizes being referred to as 'The Alfred Nobel Peace Pools.'

In 2000, King's College London opened the ''Franklin-Wilkins Building'' in honour of Dr. Franklin's and Professor Wilkins' work at the college.

The wording on the new DNA sculpture (which was donated by James Watson) outside Clare College's Thirkill Court, Cambridge, England is

a) on the base: :i) "These strands unravel during cell reproduction. Genes are encoded in the sequence of bases." :ii) "The double helix model was supported by the work of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins."

b) on the helices: :i) "The structure of DNA was discovered in 1953 by Francis Crick and James Watson while Watson lived here at Clare." :ii) "The molecule of DNA has two helical strands that are linked by base pairs Adenine – Thymine or Guanine – Cytosine."

References

Books featuring Maurice Wilkins

Robert Olby; 'Wilkins, Maurice Hugh Frederick (1916–2004), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, Oxford University Press, Jan 2008

Robert Olby; "Francis Crick: Hunter of Life's Secrets", Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, ISBN 9780879697983, published in August 2009.

John Finch; 'A Nobel Fellow On Every Floor', Medical Research Council 2008, 381 pp, ISBN 978-1840469-40-0; this book is all about the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge

Robert Olby; "The Path to The Double Helix: Discovery of DNA"; first published in October 1974 by MacMillan, with foreword by Francis Crick; ISBN 0-486-68117-3; the definitive DNA textbook, revised in 1994, with a 9 page postscript.

Horace Freeland Judson, "The Eighth Day of Creation. Makers of the Revolution in Biology"; CSHL Press 1996 ISBN 0-87969-478-5.

Watson, James D. ''The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA''; The Norton Critical Edition, which was published in 1980, edited by Gunther S. Stent:ISBN 0-393-01245-X.

Chomet, S. (Ed.), ''D.N.A. Genesis of a Discovery'', 1994, Newman- Hemisphere Press, London; NB a few copies are available from Newman-Hemisphere at 101 Swan Court, London SW3 5RY (phone: 07092 060530).

Maddox, Brenda, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, 2002. ISBN 0-06-018407-8.

Sayre, Anne 1975. Rosalind Franklin and DNA. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. ISBN 0-393-32044-8.

Wilkins, Maurice, The Third Man of the Double Helix: The Autobiography of Maurice Wilkins ISBN 0-19-860665-6.

Crick, Francis, 1990. What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery (Basic Books reprint edition) ISBN 0-465-09138-5

Watson, James D., The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, Atheneum, 1980, ISBN 0-689-70602-2 (first published in 1968)

Krude, Torsten (Ed.) DNA Changing Science and Society: The Darwin Lectures for 2003 CUP 2003, includes a lecture by Sir Aaron Klug on Rosalind Franklin's involvement in the determination of the structure of DNA.

Ridley, Matt; "Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code (Eminent Lives)" was first published in June 2006 in the USA and then in the UK September 2006, by HarperCollins Publishers; 192 pp, ISBN 0-06-082333-X; this short book is in the publisher's "Eminent Lives" series.

"Light Is A Messenger, the life and science of William Lawrence Bragg" by Graeme Hunter, ISBN 0-19-852921-X; Oxford University Press, 2004.

"Designs For Life: Molecular Biology After World War II" by Soraya De Chadarevian; CUP 2002, 444 pp; ISBN 0-521-57078-6; it includes James Watson's "well kept open secret" from April 2003!

Tait, Sylvia & James "A Quartet of Unlikely Discoveries" (Athena Press 2004) ISBN 184401343X

External links

Professor Maurice Wilkins, Obituary from The Independent on Sunday, 9 October 2004.

Crick's personal papers at Mandeville Special Collections Library, Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego

for the People's Archive/BBC 90 story interview with Crick AND the 236 story interview with Brenner.

Presentation speech at the Nobel Prize ceremony in 1962.

Reading University site on 50th anniversary of Discovery of the structure of DNA. Includes a list of Books on the subject.

Biography (from Nobel)

Biography (from the New Zealand Edge)

Discovery Story in BA Magazine

DNA: The King's Story detailing Wilkins' involvement in elucidating the structure of DNA

DNA and Social Responsibility Project: Archiving Maurice Wilkin's Personal Papers

List of classic papers in ''Nature'' on DNA structure

Listen to Francis Crick and James Watson talking on the BBC

– for reproduction of the original text in June 1953.

for Lynne Elkins' article on Franklin.

New York Times 50th anniversary series of excellent articles.

The first American newspaper coverage of the discovery of the DNA structure: Saturday, June 13, 1953 The New York Times

Listen to an oral history interview with Maurice Wilkins – a life story interview recorded for National Life Stories at the British Library

Category:1916 births Category:2004 deaths Category:Academics of King's College London Category:Fellows of King's College London Category:Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge Category:Alumni of the University of Birmingham Category:Biophysicists Category:Commanders of the Order of the British Empire Category:English physicists Category:Fellows of the Royal Society Category:Manhattan Project people Category:Members of the European Molecular Biology Organization Category:Molecular biologists Category:Naturalised citizens of the United Kingdom Category:British physicists Category:Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine Category:British Nobel laureates Category:People educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham Category:Radar pioneers Category:University of California, Berkeley faculty Category:New Zealand emigrants to the United Kingdom Category:New Zealand scientists

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