BIOLOGY
DNA
Francis Harry Compton Crick
Francis Harry Compton Crick, was born on the 8th June, 1916 in Weston Favell, Northampton, England into a boot and shoe manufacturing family run by his father Harry and uncle Walter, an amateur scientist. He died of colon cancer on the 28th July, 2004 at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) Thornton Hospital in La Jolla and was cremated and his ashes scattered into the Pacific. The firm was founded by their father, Walter D. Crick, a prominent amateur naturalist with two gastropods named after him. His mother was Annie Elizabeth Wilkins and he had one brother A.F. Crick a medical doctor. His schools were Northampton Grammar and a scholarship to Mill Hill school, London. After taking his degree in physics at University College, London obtaining a BSc in 1937, he began his PhD under A. N. da C. Andrade, but its completion was interrupted by the outbreak of war in 1939. During the war he worked on magnetic and acoustic mines for the British Admiralty. He married Ruth Doreen Dodd, a freelance computer programer, in 1940 and they had one son Michael Francis, a scientist born on the 25th November, 1940. The marriage was dissolved in 1947 and she married James Stewart Potter. After the war in 1947 he went to the Strangeways Research Laboratories situated in Worts Causeway, Cambridge where he was a biology student under the Medical Research Council. In 1949 he again enrolled as a doctoral student at Caius college, Cambridge and joined the MRC headed by Max Perutz, housed in the Cavendish Laborities in Cambridge, becoming a research student learning the basics of biology, organic chemistry and crystallography. Working with W. Cochran and V. Vand he worked out the general theory of X-ray defraction by a helix. He did not obtain his PhD in X-ray defraction, polypetides and proteins until 1954. He was married for the second time in 1949 to Odile Speed, an artist, working as a naval officer translating captured German documents for the Admiralty at their headquarters in Whitehall, London; she was to draw the first double helix for a science paper published in the publication Nature in 1952, they had two daughters Gabrielle Anne born the 15th July, 1951 and Jacqueline Marie-Therese born the 12th March, 1954 later Nichols. © BA
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