Highway to Helix

Francis Crick, who discovered the definitive way to get into a woman’s genes, has died at the age of 88. Crick and his partner James Watson won the 1962 Nobel Prize for discovering the double helix shape of DNA, or as Crick humbly put it, “unlocking the secret of life.” Their discovery determined that each strand of the double helix could become a template for copying an organism’s genes offered groundbreaking insight into evolution, and led to dozens of really bad sci-fi films. Their discovery at Cambridge University gave birth to the $30-billion a year biotechnology industry, including genetically enhanced drugs and vaccines, criminal identification and improved fertility. Crick and Watson eschewed such radical efforts as experimentation, preferring to think, argue and think some more, then leaving the typing to Watson’s sister and creation of the double helix model to Crick’s wife.

Although hailed as the dominant mind in molecular biology, his efforts beyond the cellular level were less well accepted. He argued that dreams were the mind’s way of storing memory more efficiently and in 1981 suggested that life on Earth began when microorganisms wafted in from spacecraft.