A Late Bloomer

Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology 1962

Francis Crick won the 1962 Nobel Prize for Medicine/Physiology, along with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, for the discovery of the structure of DNA. Dr. Crick is currently the Kieckhefer Professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA.

As a boy, Dr. Francis Crick was curious and yearned to discover things. He once told his mother he was afraid that by the time he grew up all the important discoveries would be made and there would be nothing left for him to find out. His mother put his worry to rest by reassuring him that there would, no doubt, be plenty of scientific mysteries left to uncover.

Francis' inquisitiveness about the world was rewarded by a gift from his parents - a children's encyclopedia. The books captured his interest and he answered his own questions by conducting experiments at home. Once he attempted to make artificial silk. In another experiment he blew up bottles using electricity, which didn't go over too well with his parents. Francis was a fine student who says he didn't care much for math and chemistry but was interested in studying physics. He also loved to play tennis, soccer and rugby.

By his own account, Francis Crick was a late bloomer in the serious pursuit of a science career. It wasn't until age 31 that he entered Cambridge University, in England, with the intention of performing scientific research. That forced an important decision on Francis - on which science topic should he focus?

Through discussions with friends and his own theory he calls "the Gossip Test" that "what one is really interested in is what one gossips about," he narrowed his choices down to two topics: the study of how the brain works (neurobiology), and the study of what makes cells work (molecular biology).

Dr. Crick taught himself new subjects by reading a lot, but admits that in spite of all his reading he had a "very superficial knowledge" of his two chosen subjects. "I certainly had no deep insight into either of them," says Dr. Crick. "What attracted me to them was that each contained a major mystery - the mystery of life and the mystery of consciousness. I wanted to know more exactly what, in scientific terms, those mysteries were. I felt it would be splendid if I finally made some small contribution to their solution, but that seemed too far away to worry about."

Dr. Crick chose to study molecular biology. Within that field, he focused his interests on studying protein structure. He soon got a job at the Cavendish Laboratory, a premiere lab for physics research at the time, and embarked on the research path that would result in his discovery of the structure of DNA.

In 1953, Dr. Crick and Dr. James Watson published their first reports detailing their discovery of DNAs double-helix structure.

Adapted from Curiosity is the Key to Discovery: The Story of How Nobel Laureates Entered the World of Science, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 1992

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