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--- Begin Message ---The article below from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by [EMAIL PROTECTED]gO TO http://www.nytimes.com/pages/health/healthspecial/index.html?8dpc for full coverage [EMAIL PROTECTED] /--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight ------------\ GARDEN STATE: NOW PLAYING IN NY & LA - SELECT CITIES AUG 6 GARDEN STATE stars Zach Braff, Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard and Ian Holm. NEWSWEEK's David Ansen says "Writer-Director Zach Braff has a genuine filmmaker's eye and is loaded with talent." Watch the teaser trailer that has all of America buzzing and talk back with Zach Braff on the Garden State Blog at: http://www.foxsearchlight.com/gardenstate/index_nyt.html \----------------------------------------------------------/ Crick, Who Discovered DNA Structure With Watson, Dies July 29, 2004 By NICHOLAS WADE Francis H. C. Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, the genetic blueprint for life, and the leading molecular biologist of his age, died Wednesday night in a hospital in San Diego. He was 88. He died after a long battle with colon cancer, said Andrew Porterfield, a spokesman for the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where he worked. Dr. Crick laid the foundations of molecular biology in a sustained burst of creativity that began in 1953 with the discovery of the structure of DNA, the hereditary material, in Cambridge, England, and ended, about 13 years later, with the subject's primary problems solved, most of them either by Dr. Crick himself or by scientists in his circle. The discovery of the structure of DNA resolved longstanding questions about the nature of the hereditary material and the manner in which it is copied as one generation succeeds another. Their proposal for the structure, almost immediately accepted, was electrifying to scientists not only because of its inherent elegance but also because it showed how biology, evolution and the nature of life itself could fundamentally be explained in terms of physics and chemistry. Indeed, the desire to replace religious with rational explanations of life was a principal motivation of Dr. Crick's career. So central is DNA to biology that the names of Francis H. C. Crick and James D. Watson, his American colleague in the discovery, may be remembered as long as those of Darwin and Mendel, the architects of the two pillars of modern biology: the theory of evolution and the laws of genetics. Dr. Crick was a scientist with a thirst to understand and a talent for productive friendships. It was his two-year collaboration with Dr. Watson that made possible the discovery of the structure of DNA, a feat that neither would have accomplished without the other. After Dr. Watson returned to the United States, Dr. Crick's close collaborator for many years was Sydney Brenner, with whom he solved the nature of the genetic code. Dr. Crick occupied a rarely paralleled position of intellectual leadership in the early years of molecular biology. In intense efforts to explore beyond the door opened by the discovery of DNA, biologists from Paris to Pasadena, Calif., were drawn into a pursuit that at every stage was shaped by Francis Crick. "By brain, wit, vigor of personality, strength of voice, intellectual charm and scorn, a lot of travel and ceaseless letter-writing, Crick coordinated the research of many other biologists, disciplined their thinking, arbitrated their conflicts, communicated and explained their results," wrote the historian Horace Freeland Judson in "The Eighth Day of Creation." The French biologist Jacques Monod told Mr. Judson, "No one man discovered or created molecular biology. But one man dominates intellectually the whole field, because he knows the most and understands the most. Francis Crick." An unforgettable portrait of Francis Crick was drawn by Dr. Watson in "The Double Helix," his best-selling account of their discovery. Mr. Crick was unknown at the time, pursuing his Ph.D. at the advanced age of 35. But the lack of this credential did not diminish his confidence in his own abilities. "I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood," Dr. Watson wrote in the striking opening sentence of his book. He described Mr. Crick's animated conversation, his manic laughter, his habit - infuriating to colleagues - of pumping them for their data and showing them what it meant. "Conversation with Crick," Dr. Watson wrote, "frequently upset Sir Lawrence Bragg," the director of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge where Mr. Crick then worked, "and the sound of his voice was often sufficient to make Bragg move to a safer room." Yet Dr. Watson's vivid portrait held elements of caricature. Mr. Crick's immodesty did not extend beyond the realm of intellectual argument. "Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick," Dr. Crick wrote diffidently in a memoir titled `'What Mad Pursuit." On the day of the discovery, Dr. Watson asserted, "Francis winged into the Eagle," the dingy Cambridge pub where they lunched every day, "to tell everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life." Dr. Crick said he did not remember that incident, "but I do recall going home and telling Odile [his wife] that we seemed to have made a big discovery." "Years later she told me that she hadn't believed a word of it," he continued. " `You were always coming home and saying things like that,' she said, `so naturally I thought nothing of it.' " Francis Harry Compton Crick was born on June 8, 1916, in Northampton, England, where his father and uncle ran a boot and shoe factory founded by their father. He studied physics at University College, London, and after a short period researching the viscosity of water under high pressure (in his view "the dullest problem imaginable"), he was drawn by World War II into military research, working on the design of magnetic and acoustic mines. He did so well at this job that after the war, Dr. R. V. Jones, the head of Britain's wartime scientific intelligence, wanted Mr. Crick to succeed him. But Mr. Crick chose research. "Looking back, it was absurd because I had a tenured job," he said in a recent interview. Finding himself at loose ends after the war, he decided the most interesting research problem lay in trying to understand the physical basis of life, the division between the living and the non-living. The choice eventually drew him to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, one of the world's leading centers for studying the structure of proteins by X-ray analysis. At 35, he started working for his Ph.D. on the structure of proteins. Proteins were already understood to be the cell's working parts and Mr. Crick began a Ph.D. thesis on the structure of hemoglobin. He worked in a branch of the Cavendish, the Medical Research Council unit headed by Dr. Max F. Perutz. Well before his thesis was finished, however, he realized that a far more interesting problem was the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. A classic experiment of 1944 had pointed to DNA as the genetic material but biologists had made almost no progress since then in understanding how the hereditary information might be stored and few were actively working on the problem. Mr. Crick's life was changed one day in October 1951 when a 23-year-old American biologist walked into his life. James Watson also understood that the structure of DNA was the key to everything. Neither was supposed to be working on DNA, but they at once fell into discussing how the problem might be approached, in conversations so sustained that the pair were given their own small office at the Cavendish laboratory so their voices would not disturb everyone else. "Jim and I hit it off immediately," Dr. Crick later wrote, "partly because our interests were astonishingly similar and partly, I suspect, because a certain youthful arrogance, a ruthlessness and an impatience with sloppy thinking came naturally to both of us." Their approach, copied from the great chemist Linus Pauling, then at the California Institute of Technology, was to build exact scale models that would be compatible with the limited information available from X-ray crystallography. One difficulty was that the problem of DNA's structure had been assigned to another scientist, Maurice H. F. Wilkins of King's College, London, and under the etiquette of British science, to Dr. Watson's amazement, no one else was supposed to muscle in on it. But Dr. Wilkins, a wartime friend of Mr. Crick's, said he did not object to his attempting a model. Dr. Watson and Mr. Crick soon had one ready. It was based, in part, on X-ray data about DNA obtained by Dr. Wilkins's colleague, Dr. Rosaland Franklin. Dr. Watson had heard Dr. Franklin describe these data in a public lecture but had misunderstood them. For their model, Mr. Crick and Dr. Watson constructed the backbone of the DNA molecule in the form of a double spiral, or helix, with the two helices held together in the middle by metal ions. The bases, the four chemical subunits that spell out the genetic information, pointed outward because Dr. Watson and Mr. Crick could see no way that the necessarily irregular sequence of bases would match together neatly if they pointed inward. With the model completed, Mr. Crick invited Dr. Wilkins and Dr. Wilkins's colleague Rosalind Franklin up to Cambridge to inspect their progress. Dr. Franklin instantly recognized a glaring error and a few days later Bragg, embarrassed by the debacle, ordered Mr. Crick to do no more work on DNA. Mr. Crick and Dr. Watson nonetheless kept thinking about the problem and a few months later were able to reverse Bragg's prohibition. The precipitating event was the announcement by Linus Pauling, who was Bragg's peer and rival, that Pauling had found the solution to the structure of DNA. Mr. Crick and Dr. Watson knew that Pauling's solution was wrong, but believed it might be only days before Pauling realized his error and seized on the correct solution. In their second attempt, Mr. Crick and Dr. Watson picked up several important clues. As part of a reporting system designed to share information among laboratories supported by the British Medical Research Council, Mr. Crick came to see new X-ray data generated by Franklin. Although Franklin insisted in public lectures that these data proved DNA could not be a helix, Mr. Crick understood that they proved the opposite and that the two chains were anti-parallel, in other words that the head of one was always laid against the tail of the other. The two biologists had also belatedly learned of Chargaff's rules, named for Erwin Chargaff, a longtime student of DNA at Columbia University. The four kinds of bases that occur in DNA are known as adenine, guanine, thymine and cytosine, or A, G, T and C for short. Chargaff had discovered that from whatever organism DNA was isolated, A and T were found in roughly equal quantities, as were G and C. >From Jerry Donohue, an experienced American chemist who happened then to be sharing their office, Mr. Crick and Dr. Watson also learned the true chemical structures of the DNA bases and the fact that the chemical structures shown in current textbooks were incorrect. The ingredients for the discovery were now all in place. With the right structures in hand, Dr. Watson was playing one day with cardboard cutouts of the four bases when he noticed that an A-T pair on his small desk was identical in shape with a G-C pair. He immediately perceived how the bases could point inward, holding the spiral staircase together with steps of always equal width, provided that adenine always paired with thymine, guanine with cytosine. The pairing rule at once explained the equivalences of Chargaff's rules and, more critically, how one DNA chain could serve as the template for building another, the essential requirement for any molecule that embodied hereditary information. "That morning," Mr. Judson wrote in `The Eighth Day of Creation,' "Watson and Crick knew, although still in mind only, the entire structure: it had emerged from the shadow of billions of years, absolute and simple, and was seen and understood for the first time." In his memoir Dr. Crick said: "It's true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold, but the fact remains that we were looking for gold. Both of us had decided, quite independently of each other, that the central problem in molecular biology was the chemical structure of the gene." No other scientists were pursuing the structure with such single-mindedness. It took only a few days to build the model dictated by their new concepts. This time it convinced everyone because it explained everything. `'It has not escaped our notice," Mr. Crick wrote in a lapidary conclusion to their report of April 25, 1953, in the scientific journal Nature, `'that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." After making the discovery and completing the requirements for his Ph.D., Dr. Crick plunged into the problems now made accessible by the new structure. How does the sequence of bases in DNA determine the sequence of amino acids in the ribbon-like structure of each protein molecule? How is the information copied from DNA and transferred to the cell's protein-synthesizing centers? Though many scientists played important roles in solving this array of problems, the guiding intelligence at almost all points was Dr. Crick's. It was he, for example, who first realized there could be only a specific number of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Scanning the confused biochemical literature, he drew up the canonical list of the 20 acids. With his colleague Sydney Brenner, Dr. Crick eventually proved, in an experiment of remarkable elegance, that the genetic code was a comma-less, triplet code in which sets of three bases in the DNA sequence determine a corresponding sequence of amino acids in proteins. The Crick-Brenner experiment essentially consisted of deleting bases, one by one, in the DNA of bacteria, and showing that only after three bases had been eliminated in close proximity did the DNA-transcribing system come back into correct phase. In a conversation in 1960 with the French biologist Fran�ois Jacob, Dr. Crick and Dr. Brenner recognized the long-puzzling identity of the messenger chemical, now known as messenger RNA, that distributes copies of the genetic information in the cell's nucleus to the protein-making apparatus in the cell's periphery. In another insight of remarkable power, Dr. Crick in his "adaptor hypothesis" divined that there must exist both a class of carrier molecules that recognize triplets on the messenger and adaptor enzymes that link each kind of amino acid to its appropriate carrier. Biochemists ridiculed the idea, saying that if the adaptor enzymes existed, they would already have found them. But both the transfer RNA's and the adaptor enzymes proved to exist, as Dr. Crick had predicted. Dr. Crick derived several sweeping theories that have stood the test of time. He assumed from the start that the genetic code was universal to all forms of life, as indeed with trivial exceptions it has proved to be. His "central dogma" formulated the view that once genetic information has passed into protein, it cannot get out again. The dogma meant that the genetic message is impenetrable by information from outside the cell, thus excluding the Lamarckian thesis that acquired characteristics can be inherited. In 1962 Dr. Crick and Dr. Watson and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in medicine. Dr. Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin had contributed the X-ray data that suggested and confirmed the structure of DNA but Dr. Franklin had died of leukemia in 1958. The discovery of DNA brought unwelcome attention, too. In 1967 Dr. Crick read a draft of Dr. Watson's account of their discovery, "The Double Helix." The memoir, which then bore the working title "Honest Jim," was a startling departure from the usual staid accounts of laboratory life. After its opening declaration about Dr. Crick's lack of modesty, it adroitly portrayed the participants' feelings as the helter-skelter pursuit of DNA wound to its resolution. Dr. Crick viewed the gossipy narrative as a betrayal of their friendship, a violation of his privacy and a distortion of their methods and motives. He was unsuccessful in efforts to prevent the book's publication. Dr. Crick later came to terms with his colleague's account. "In those days there was a different convention, at least in Britain, about writing about your friends," he said in an interview in 2003. "But I came out of the book quite well, apart from the first sentence. As Peter Medawar said, the person who comes out worst is Jim." One of the problems caused by the book was Dr. Watson's implication that the pair of them had obtained Dr. Franklin's data on DNA surreptitiously and hence had deprived her of due credit for the DNA discovery. Dr. Crick believed he obtained the data fairly since she had presented it at a public lecture, to which he had been invited. Though Dr. Watson had misreported a vital figure from the lecture, a correct version reached Dr. Crick through the Medical Research Council report. If Dr. Franklin felt Dr. Crick had treated her unfairly, she never gave any sign of it. She became friends with both Dr. Crick and Dr. Watson, and spent her last remission from cancer in Dr. Crick's house. Dr. Crick gave his younger colleague no equivalent cause for complaint. Dr. Watson acknowledged the selflessness of Dr. Crick's motives. "Francis was always so kind to me," he said in an interview in 1998. "He never tried to promote himself. He was just interested in solving problems." By 1966 the first era of biology at the molecular level was complete. Though many details of enormous interest remained to be discovered, the foundations had been well and truly laid. Dr. Crick and Dr. Brenner decided to move on to another vast field of biology, the manner in which a whole organism develops from the embryo. In 1977 Dr. Crick left Cambridge, and his well-known house on Portugal Place, with its golden helix above the front door, where he and his wife, Odile, had held many high-spirited parties. The Cricks moved to the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif. There he took on another challenging unsolved problem of biology - the nature of consciousness. He had little expectation of producing any radically new ideas at his advanced age of 72, he wrote in 1988, "but at my time of life I had a right to do things for my own amusement." Never one to let his mind lie fallow, Dr. Crick produced a stream of papers about aspects of the brain and a well-regarded popular book, "The Astonishing Hypothesis" (1994), which summarized his ideas. Another diversion that Dr. Crick allowed himself was a bold speculation about the origin of life. Only the most eminent and secure of scientists would dare flirt with the idea that Earth may have been seeded with life by a rocketship from another planet. But that possibility, a thesis Dr. Crick termed "Directed Panspermia," was aired in an article he published in Icarus (1973) with his Salk Institute colleague Leslie E. Orgel and in a popular book by Dr. Crick alone, "Life Itself" (1981). Dr. Crick in no way rejected the orthodox scientific thesis that life evolved in some way, yet to be specified, from the chemicals present on the early Earth. But he was impressed by the unexplained universality of the genetic code, and uncomfortable with the narrow window of time between the date the Earth cooled enough to be habitable and the first appearance of life in the fossil record. With "Directed Panspermia," he prepared, in effect, an intellectual escape hatch, an alternative explanation for life should scientists in fact find it too hard to account plausibly for the remarkably rapid emergence of Earth's first life forms. Dr. Crick's style of practicing science was unusual. Most biologists do experiments; he did so very rarely, being one of biology's few theoreticians. He did not take graduate students, preferring instead to work with a single colleague. His scientific interlocutors were first Dr. Watson, then Dr. Sydney Brenner during the Golden Age of molecular biology, and for his work on the brain Dr. Christof Koch. "Francis essentially works alone but likes to have a colleague to play against, so to speak," Dr. Brenner said recently. He wrote little about his own life and, despite his fame, remained a surprisingly private person. Dr. Crick's first marriage, to Ruth Doreen Dodd, ended in divorce in 1947. He is survived by his wife, Odile Speed; a son from his first marriage, Michael F. C. Crick of Seattle; and by two daughters from his second marriage, Gabrielle A. Crick and Jacqueline M. T. Nichols, both of England; and four grandchildren. What is the nature of scientific genius? Dr. Crick was perhaps offering an answer in his response to a different question, that of whether he enjoyed his life. "I cannot do better," he said, than to quote from a lecture by the painter John Minton "in which he said of his own artistic creations, `The important thing is to be there when the picture is painted.' And this, it seems to me, is partly a matter of luck and partly good judgment, inspiration and persistent application." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/29/science/29CND-CRICK.html?ex=1092132363&ei=1&en=fd81b51e6a415251 --------------------------------- Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. Imagine reading The New York Times any time & anywhere you like! Leisurely catch up on events & expand your horizons. Enjoy now for 50% off Home Delivery! 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