Biography

Francis Harry Compton Crick was born on June 8th, 1916, at Northampton, England, being the elder child of Harry Crick and Annie Elizabeth Wilkins. He has one brother, A. F. Crick, who is a doctor inNew Zealand.

Crick was educated at Northampton Grammar School and Mill Hill School, London. He studied physics at University College, London, obtained a B.Sc. in 1937, and started research for aPh.D. under Prof E. N. da C. Andrade, but this was interrupted by the outbreak of war in 1939. During the war he worked as a scientist for the British Admiralty, mainly in connection with magnetic andacoustic mines. He left the Admiralty in 1947 to study biology.

Supported by a studentship from the Medical Research Council and with some financial help from his family, Crick went to Cambridge andworked at the Strangeways Research Laboratory. In 1949 he joined the Medical Research Council Unit headed by M. F. Perutz of which he has been a member ever since. This Unit was for many years housedin the Cavendish Laboratory Cambridge, but in 1962 moved into a large new building - the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology - on the New Hospital site. He became a researchstudent for the second time in 1950, being accepted as a member of Caius College, Cambridge, and obtained a Ph.D. in 1954 on a thesis entitled «X-ray diffraction: polypeptides and proteins».

During theacademic year 1953-1954 Crick was on leave of absence at the Protein Structure Project of the Brooklyn Polytechnic in Brooklyn, New York. He has also lectured at Harvard, as a Visiting Professor, ontwo occasions, and has visited other laboratories in the States for short periods.

In 1947 Crick knew no biology and practically no organic chemistry or crystallography, so that much of the nextfew years was spent in learning the elements of these subjects. During this period, together with W. Cochran and V. Vand he worked out the general theory of X-ray diffraction by a helix, and at the...