# The Story of Francis Crick, a new masterpiece biography by Matthew Cobb

An episode of [Ground Truths](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1728526108), 7 Dec 2025, 59 min.

Audio: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/179191415/c05967f1745a804da56f5cc6d5bfd1e0.mp3

A recording from my enthralling conversation with Prof Matthew Cobb about the life and science contributions of Francis Crick, regarded as one of the most influential biologists of all times, along with Darwin and Mendel. As you’ll see, there’s so much more to Crick’s story than cracking DNA’s double helix structure in a matter of weeks with James Watson. Matthew Cobb, Emeritus Professor of the University of Manchester, has written several award-winning books on life science, but I think this is his most important one to date, deeply researched and a thrilling account of Crick’s life, clearing up, as best as one can, many questions, and presenting some surprises. The transcript is available (A.I. generated) by clicking at the top right. A few things we discussed —Crick’s reaction to James Watson’s book Crick contrasted his own approach to science writing with Watson’s memoir: “The difference between my lecture and your book is that my lecture had a lot more intellectual content and nothing like so much gossip. (...) Your book on the other hand, is mainly gossip and I think it a pity in this way that there is so much of it that it obscures some of the important conclusions which can be drawn of what we did at the time”. —The Peyote Poem, by Michael McClure (part 1) that had a big influence on Crick —Crick’s 1994 neuroscience book “The Astonishing Hypothesis” “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free Weill, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”—Crick The book has been reviewed at Science, Nature, The Economist and many other journals. Here is a gift link to The Economist It has deservedly been named a best book of 2025 by The Guardian, The Economist, and many other media. Thank you Bruce Lanphear, Harshi Peiris, Ph.D., Elisabetta Pilotti, Allan Konopka, Stephen B. Thomas, PhD, and over 500 others for tuning into my live video with Matthew Cobb! ********************* Upcoming, this Wednesday 9AM PT, live podcast I will be interviewing Dan Buettner founder of the Blue Zones Join us! ********************** Thanks to US News for recently being named one of the 25 best leaders in the United States https://www.usnews.com/news/leaders/articles/best-leaders-2025-eric-topol ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Thanks to >190,000 Ground Truths subscribers from every US state and 210 countries. Your subscription to these free essays and podcasts makes my work in putting them together worthwhile. If you found this interesting PLEASE share it! Paid subscriptions are voluntary and all proceeds from them go to support Scripps Research. They do allow for posting comments and questions, which I do my best to respond to. Please don’t hesitate to post comments and give me feedback. Let me know topics that you would like to see covered. Many thanks to those who have contributed—they have greatly helped fund our summer internship programs for the past two years. It enabled us to accept and support 47 summer interns in 2025! We aim to accept even more of the several thousand who will apply for summer 2026. Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe

## Transcript

[0:00] And just so as we're getting warmed up here,
[0:01] this is Matthew Cobb's seventh book,
[0:05] okay,
[0:06] and
[0:06] SPEAKER_00: He has another one, and he's working on Heredity.
[0:10] SPEAKER_00: So he's not going to stop writing, and he is amazing.
[0:14] SPEAKER_00: Now,
[0:15] I thought we'd start with all the insights I learned about
[0:20] Francis Crick from such
[0:22] SPEAKER_00: a deep interrogation of what he was like.
[0:28] SPEAKER_00: He, in many ways, was a challenging dogma, a boat rocker,
[0:35] SPEAKER_00: But interestingly, besides being agnostic, he would throw racy parties.
[0:41] SPEAKER_00: He's Bohemian.
[0:42] SPEAKER_00: He's a philanderer.
[0:43] SPEAKER_00: He had an open marriage with his wife, Odile, is that how you say it?
[0:48] SPEAKER_00: For 55 years, even though he had affairs and whatnot.
[0:52] SPEAKER_00: He was an intellectual snob.
[0:54] SPEAKER_00: He never voted.
[0:55] SPEAKER_00: He had no radio or TV until 1980.
[0:57] SPEAKER_00: So arrogant, ruthless.
[1:03] uh he wrote about stuff that would be eugenics uh quick-witted
[1:08] uh but on the other
[1:09] hand he would give talks to children um there are a lot of
[1:13] paradoxes about this man
[1:14] and maybe you can kind of tell me did i have it right that this
[1:19] this guy was just
[1:20] um a very unique character well i certainly don't think he'd
[1:25] last very long in
[1:26] SPEAKER_03: modern day academia
[1:28] not only because he was rubbish at doing experiments and asking
[1:31] for money,
[1:31] SPEAKER_03: he only ever applied for one large grant in his life,
[1:35] SPEAKER_03: but clearly aspects of his behaviour would now be deemed unsuitable.
[1:40] SPEAKER_03: I mean,
[1:41] SPEAKER_03: having been said,
[1:41] SPEAKER_03: he had no...
[1:42] SPEAKER_03: I mean,
[1:43] SPEAKER_03: you know,
[1:44] SPEAKER_03: I knew about his affairs,
[1:45] SPEAKER_03: which is one of the things that a lot of people want to talk about,
[1:47] and I realised very soon on that that was not going to give me
[1:51] much insight into
[1:52] SPEAKER_03: his science,
[1:52] SPEAKER_03: which is what I was really interested in.
[1:54] SPEAKER_03: And so...
[1:56] SPEAKER_03: out of respect for the various people involved.
[1:58] SPEAKER_03: I haven't actually named any names,
[2:00] and they're mentioned every now and again as kind of little
[2:03] bits of information.
[2:05] SPEAKER_03: But it...
[2:06] they're not really important in understanding him unlike say
[2:09] picasso right i mean
[2:10] if you don't understand picasso's affairs you can't understand
[2:13] the various phases
[2:14] of his of his art because they're all linked with relationships
[2:17] with women whereas
[2:18] this is just something that goes on but that being said i just
[2:21] want to make clear
[2:22] in case it was unclear he none of his affairs with students or
[2:26] anybody with whom he
[2:27] SPEAKER_03: had a position of authority so
[2:29] SPEAKER_03: You know, he wouldn't be drummed out for that.
[2:31] SPEAKER_03: I just think people would raise their eyebrows.
[2:33] SPEAKER_03: And certainly his views on eugenics,
[2:36] SPEAKER_03: which continued into the 1970s,
[2:39] SPEAKER_03: would be seen as unacceptable today.
[2:41] SPEAKER_03: Although I noticed that a lot of the tech bros have very similar ideas.
[2:46] Because Crick's main interest,
[2:49] as he put it,
[2:49] was he had a prejudice against the poor.
[2:52] SPEAKER_03: Which seems very strange.
[2:54] And I think this is one of the actually really interesting
[2:56] things that I found in
[2:59] SPEAKER_03: working on the book.
[2:59] SPEAKER_03: Because most of the science is either...
[3:03] SPEAKER_03: There's bits of it,
[3:03] SPEAKER_03: especially in his youth and early career,
[3:06] SPEAKER_03: which are very detailed and a bit boring.
[3:08] SPEAKER_03: But most of his later work is really big ideas.
[3:11] And what I wanted to do was to work out how on earth he was
[3:15] able to have all these
[3:16] SPEAKER_03: ideas in his head.
[3:18] SPEAKER_03: And then...
[3:19] There's every time it touches anything to do with society,
[3:23] anything to do with politics,
[3:26] SPEAKER_03: He's a complete ninny.
[3:28] So it was actually quite reassuring that he's not a complete
[3:31] genius in everything.
[3:32] SPEAKER_03: There are parts of the world,
[3:34] SPEAKER_03: in particular the social world,
[3:36] that he just doesn't understand and doesn't make the effort to
[3:39] try and work out
[3:40] SPEAKER_03: what's going on.
[3:41] So there were times,
[3:43] most of the time,
[3:43] I was just kind of astonished by quite how clever he was.
[3:47] SPEAKER_03: But there are these other parts where I can see, no, you don't get it.
[3:50] SPEAKER_03: You don't understand.
[3:52] SPEAKER_03: So why don't you understand it?
[3:54] SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
[3:55] And the book that I ended up putting him on was that these
[3:59] ideas come from his Edwardian past.
[4:02] SPEAKER_03: He was born in 1916, right?
[4:04] SPEAKER_03: So that's a long time ago.
[4:06] SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
[4:07] SPEAKER_03: And he imbibed all these ideas in the 1920s,
[4:12] which were as kind of nationalistic and stupid and racist as
[4:16] you might expect,
[4:17] SPEAKER_03: and never really interrogated them.
[4:20] And for most of his life,
[4:22] it had no consequence because he wasn't thinking about such
[4:24] things.
[4:25] But when he did,
[4:26] he kind of flipped back to this very old way of thinking.
[4:30] SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
[4:30] SPEAKER_00: no,
[4:30] SPEAKER_00: and I thought there was some common ground there with James Watson,
[4:35] SPEAKER_00: who also was known for his eugenics race.
[4:41] SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
[4:41] SPEAKER_00: He also was a misogynist.
[4:43] SPEAKER_00: But, I mean, they shared these bad traits, wouldn't you say?
[4:48] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[4:48] SPEAKER_03: Yeah,
[4:48] SPEAKER_03: well,
[4:49] Jim's actually a bit more interesting because one of the things
[4:52] I noticed was in
[4:53] SPEAKER_03: 1972,
[4:54] SPEAKER_03: there was a petition to the academies,
[4:58] SPEAKER_03: the National Academies of Science in the USA,
[5:00] to say that there should be support for research into the
[5:05] genetic basis of
[5:06] SPEAKER_03: intelligence.
[5:07] SPEAKER_03: Now, we know what they mean, right?
[5:09] SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
[5:10] SPEAKER_03: We know nothing about black people or anything like that was mentioned,
[5:14] SPEAKER_03: but we know what they meant.
[5:15] SPEAKER_03: And it was all to do in particular with the work of Arthur Jensen.
[5:18] And Crick signed this petition and he got people like Jacques
[5:22] Monod to sign it.
[5:24] SPEAKER_03: Jim Watson did not sign it.
[5:26] SPEAKER_03: And it was all coached in terms of academic freedom.
[5:30] SPEAKER_03: And Jim was much more left-wing and very supportive,
[5:34] SPEAKER_03: for example,
[5:35] SPEAKER_03: of women in science in the 1960s.
[5:39] Something happened to him in the 80s and 90s where he changed
[5:46] his mind about a lot
[5:47] SPEAKER_03: of these issues.
[5:48] SPEAKER_03: And that will be the topic of,
[5:49] SPEAKER_03: not my book,
[5:50] SPEAKER_03: but my good friend Nathaniel Comfort's forthcoming biography of Watson.
[5:54] SPEAKER_03: And that's the riddle he's got to try and work out the answer to.
[5:57] SPEAKER_03: And that will be out in a year or so.
[5:59] SPEAKER_00: That'll be really interesting.
[6:00] SPEAKER_00: Okay.
[6:01] SPEAKER_00: Now we're going to go into how did Francis Crick get to this two careers,
[6:08] SPEAKER_00: if you will,
[6:10] SPEAKER_00: or starting two fields in science.
[6:13] SPEAKER_00: in many respects.
[6:15] SPEAKER_00: But before we get to that, some background.
[6:19] SPEAKER_00: I guess he was influenced by two scientists and their work,
[6:25] SPEAKER_00: Linus Pauling and Edwin Schrodinger,
[6:28] SPEAKER_00: and also by his child's children's encyclopedia.
[6:35] SPEAKER_00: Tell us a little bit about that.
[6:37] SPEAKER_03: Well, he called it the most important book he ever read.
[6:41] And that's partly what gave me the clue to understanding him as
[6:46] having Edwardian aspects.
[6:47] SPEAKER_03: So I thought,
[6:48] SPEAKER_03: okay,
[6:48] SPEAKER_03: he said this when he was about 80,
[6:51] SPEAKER_03: that this was the most important book he ever read.
[6:52] SPEAKER_03: He kept it to the end of his life.
[6:54] SPEAKER_03: His son, Michael, now has it, and it's incredibly well-thumbed.
[6:58] SPEAKER_03: And the Cricks had the eight-volume bound edition.
[7:00] SPEAKER_03: So this is an incredibly successful encyclopedia.
[7:04] And lots of people I've met since have said,
[7:06] oh,
[7:07] I had that,
[7:08] my parents bought it.
[7:09] SPEAKER_03: It went out of fashion about 1960, but it went through many editions.
[7:13] SPEAKER_03: And I was able to read it online.
[7:16] SPEAKER_03: And it is extraordinary in its breadth of topics that it covers.
[7:21] SPEAKER_03: The edition that Francis had was from 1908.
[7:24] SPEAKER_03: So the gene had barely been mentioned.
[7:27] barely been named,
[7:28] and there was nothing about heredity or anything like that in
[7:30] the book.
[7:31] SPEAKER_03: But it was all these...
[7:32] SPEAKER_03: It covered absolutely everything,
[7:34] SPEAKER_03: you know,
[7:35] SPEAKER_03: from flowers to fairy stories to explanations of science.
[7:39] And in particular,
[7:40] it was aimed at kind of pre-teens,
[7:43] and it is so clearly written.
[7:45] SPEAKER_03: And that's what he took from it.
[7:46] SPEAKER_03: Not only the ideas,
[7:47] SPEAKER_03: including the...
[7:49] SPEAKER_03: Because it was a British book about the empire and all the rest of it,
[7:52] SPEAKER_03: but the clarity,
[7:53] SPEAKER_03: how to write clearly and simply...
[7:56] SPEAKER_03: about science.
[7:57] SPEAKER_03: And that's what he always tried to do.
[7:59] SPEAKER_03: And yeah, that was definitely the most important book he read.
[8:04] SPEAKER_03: And then the two inspirations that led him to make this shift in 1947.
[8:10] SPEAKER_03: So you've got to remember, he's born in 1916.
[8:13] He started a PhD on what he described as the most boring topic
[8:17] in the world,
[8:18] SPEAKER_03: which is the viscosity of water under pressure,
[8:20] SPEAKER_03: because he was a physics student.
[8:21] SPEAKER_03: Starts that in 1939.
[8:22] SPEAKER_03: War breaks out.
[8:25] SPEAKER_03: His lab gets shut.
[8:28] A German landmine falls on the equipment he built,
[8:30] so it was all out of burst.
[8:31] SPEAKER_03: It couldn't be done anyway.
[8:33] SPEAKER_03: He then does various things during the war.
[8:36] SPEAKER_03: He works on mines, making mines that blow up ships.
[8:40] SPEAKER_03: After the war,
[8:40] SPEAKER_03: he does something rather mysterious that I still don't know about,
[8:43] SPEAKER_03: really,
[8:44] SPEAKER_03: in naval intelligence.
[8:46] And then in 1947,
[8:48] he's read one Linus Pauling talk about X-ray crystallography.
[8:52] SPEAKER_03: And he's also read Schrodinger's What is Life,
[8:55] SPEAKER_03: which again says you can use physical methods to get at the gene,
[8:59] SPEAKER_03: to understand biology.
[9:01] And he decides there are two things he's really interested in,
[9:04] what he wants to study.
[9:05] SPEAKER_03: He wants to understand the nature of consciousness,
[9:08] SPEAKER_03: and he wants to understand the nature of life.
[9:11] So in 1947,
[9:12] he's charted out the next 67 years or 57 years of his
[9:19] existence.
[9:20] SPEAKER_03: And that's what he did.
[9:22] SPEAKER_03: He decided that he'd deal with life first because it seemed a bit easier.
[9:25] SPEAKER_03: Plus, there was the X-ray crystallography that might help.
[9:28] SPEAKER_03: And that's what happened.
[9:29] SPEAKER_03: So that's really everything that follows from that decision in 1947.
[9:36] SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
[9:36] SPEAKER_00: no,
[9:36] it's amazing because that was his first major pivot from the
[9:41] viscosity of hot water
[9:43] to go into biology and chemistry rather than physics to start
[9:49] building molecular
[9:50] SPEAKER_00: biology.
[9:50] SPEAKER_00: So a lot of people,
[9:52] and this has been a very controversial thing about the
[9:56] discovery in February 1953
[9:57] SPEAKER_00: of the DNA structure and the other players,
[10:02] SPEAKER_00: Rosalind Franklin and
[10:03] SPEAKER_00: Maurice Wilkins.
[10:06] SPEAKER_00: And you set the record straight.
[10:07] SPEAKER_00: You really went into this.
[10:08] SPEAKER_00: I tried to.
[10:09] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[10:10] SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, I've always wondered what the hell happened there.
[10:13] SPEAKER_00: You know, what really happened?
[10:15] SPEAKER_00: What was the contribution of these different people?
[10:18] SPEAKER_00: And everybody thinks that Watson and Crick,
[10:20] SPEAKER_00: they worked together for decades when it was like weeks.
[10:25] SPEAKER_00: You can fill in the holes there.
[10:27] SPEAKER_03: Well, that's going to be very tricky.
[10:28] SPEAKER_03: So I'm going to have to skip over a lot of the detail.
[10:30] Otherwise,
[10:31] we will get lost in the weeds and we'll be here for an hour or
[10:33] so.
[10:34] SPEAKER_03: So the key thing is, you're absolutely right.
[10:38] SPEAKER_03: Watson and Crick were not, they only worked on DNA for about six weeks.
[10:43] SPEAKER_03: Neither of them were supposed to be studying it.
[10:47] SPEAKER_03: Crick,
[10:48] SPEAKER_03: as his boss Sir Lawrence Bragg said,
[10:50] SPEAKER_03: was a chap who liked doing other people's crosswords.
[10:53] So if you had a problem,
[10:54] Crick would find the answer to it,
[10:56] even if you didn't want to.
[10:57] SPEAKER_03: You know,
[10:57] he was always interested in other people's things and
[11:01] experiments that had just
[11:02] SPEAKER_03: come out.
[11:03] SPEAKER_03: How could you interpret them and so on?
[11:04] SPEAKER_03: Probably quite infuriating.
[11:06] SPEAKER_03: Certainly Bragg found it himself.
[11:08] SPEAKER_03: Watson was much younger.
[11:09] SPEAKER_03: He was, what, eight years younger.
[11:11] SPEAKER_03: And he arrived in 1951 at Cambridge.
[11:15] SPEAKER_03: And he, too, was not working on DNA.
[11:19] They were both working on protein structure,
[11:20] which is what they studied at Cambridge.
[11:23] SPEAKER_03: But Crick's very good friend,
[11:26] SPEAKER_03: Maurice Wilkins,
[11:27] SPEAKER_03: had been working on DNA first using microscopes and then using x-ray
[11:32] SPEAKER_03: crystallography for about six years.
[11:34] SPEAKER_03: Indeed,
[11:35] SPEAKER_03: Crick nearly went and worked with him at King's College,
[11:38] SPEAKER_03: Cambridge,
[11:39] SPEAKER_03: London,
[11:39] SPEAKER_03: but it didn't work out.
[11:41] SPEAKER_03: Now,
[11:42] so Crick knew what was happening all along in London because
[11:46] Wilkins would come
[11:48] along and they'd have dinner and have a drink and Wilkins would
[11:51] chat and he would
[11:52] SPEAKER_03: also...
[11:53] SPEAKER_03: complain about Rosalind Franklin.
[11:57] SPEAKER_03: And because Franklin and Wilkins just did get on.
[12:00] SPEAKER_03: Wilkins was very introverted, very quiet, didn't like argument.
[12:04] SPEAKER_03: Franklin was very vivacious.
[12:06] She came from an intellectual Jewish family that liked to have
[12:09] a good argument
[12:10] SPEAKER_03: about anything because that's the way you develop your ideas,
[12:13] SPEAKER_03: you know.
[12:15] SPEAKER_03: So these two people just could not work together.
[12:17] SPEAKER_03: That's part of the tragedy.
[12:18] SPEAKER_03: And Watson always said this, that if they'd been able to work together...
[12:21] We talk about the Wilkins-Franklin or Franklin-Wilkins
[12:24] structure,
[12:25] not about Watson and Crick.
[12:26] SPEAKER_03: They would have been nowhere.
[12:27] So there's been lots of problems,
[12:30] incredibly slow work in King's College London.
[12:34] SPEAKER_03: And then...
[12:35] SPEAKER_03: At the end of 1952,
[12:36] SPEAKER_03: they hear,
[12:38] SPEAKER_03: the people in Cambridge hear,
[12:40] SPEAKER_03: that Linus Pauling has produced a version of the structure of DNA.
[12:46] SPEAKER_03: And they knew this because Linus' son,
[12:49] SPEAKER_03: Peter,
[12:49] happened to be doing his PhD in Cambridge in the same office as
[12:54] Watson and Crick.
[12:55] SPEAKER_03: So he says, oh, we're going to get this letter.
[12:57] SPEAKER_03: And Crick has been warning the people in London,
[13:00] saying the big bad wolf is going to find the solution if you
[13:03] people don't.
[13:05] So now we've got a situation in which they've got this
[13:08] manuscript from Pauling,
[13:09] SPEAKER_03: Linus Pauling,
[13:10] SPEAKER_03: which is not right.
[13:11] It's similar to an idea that Watson and Crick had about 15
[13:14] months earlier,
[13:15] and it's inside out.
[13:17] SPEAKER_03: It's got three helices.
[13:19] SPEAKER_03: It's not right.
[13:21] SPEAKER_03: And Bragg,
[13:22] who really didn't like Crick and didn't really know much about
[13:25] Watson at all,
[13:27] SPEAKER_03: is persuaded because he's got a beef.
[13:30] SPEAKER_03: He's had a beef with Pauling for reasons we don't need to go into.
[13:34] SPEAKER_03: And so the idea...
[13:35] SPEAKER_03: of stealing a march on Pauling is too much for him to resist.
[13:40] And he says,
[13:41] okay,
[13:41] Watson and Crick,
[13:42] you've got a few weeks to try and do this.
[13:44] SPEAKER_03: And above all,
[13:45] SPEAKER_03: he does not contact his colleagues in London saying,
[13:48] SPEAKER_03: oh,
[13:49] SPEAKER_03: by the way,
[13:49] SPEAKER_03: we're moving in on your territory.
[13:52] SPEAKER_03: Meanwhile, back in London, things have gone from bad to worse.
[13:55] SPEAKER_03: And Franklin,
[13:55] SPEAKER_03: I mean,
[13:57] SPEAKER_03: she decided virtually as soon as she met Wilkins,
[13:58] SPEAKER_03: she wanted to leave,
[13:59] SPEAKER_03: right?
[14:01] SPEAKER_03: But she's now on the way out.
[14:02] SPEAKER_03: She's going to another laboratory in London in Birkbeck to work with J.D.
[14:06] SPEAKER_03: Bernal,
[14:07] SPEAKER_03: but not on DNA because the head of the King's College group has said,
[14:12] SPEAKER_03: you can't take DNA with you.
[14:14] SPEAKER_03: It's our project, which to be fair was true.
[14:16] SPEAKER_03: They'd come up with the idea.
[14:17] SPEAKER_03: She had just been brought in to work on it.
[14:20] SPEAKER_03: And then it gets tricky.
[14:23] SPEAKER_03: This is where it gets murky.
[14:25] SPEAKER_03: Because if most people know,
[14:27] SPEAKER_03: or they believe they know,
[14:29] SPEAKER_03: that Jim Watson sees one of Rosalind Franklin's photographs,
[14:34] SPEAKER_03: something called Photograph 51,
[14:35] SPEAKER_03: which has got this kind of X shape,
[14:37] SPEAKER_03: and that gives them the double helix.
[14:40] SPEAKER_03: Now, the question in all things is, how do you know that?
[14:45] SPEAKER_03: It's an expression in science.
[14:46] SPEAKER_03: It's epistemology.
[14:47] SPEAKER_03: How do you know what you know?
[14:48] SPEAKER_03: Even more so in history.
[14:50] SPEAKER_03: And the actual source of this is very, very hard to pin down.
[14:53] SPEAKER_03: Jim Watson in The Double Helix, he says, it's very vague what he says.
[14:57] SPEAKER_03: He says that he saw,
[14:58] SPEAKER_03: Wilkins showed him some images of the two forms of DNA that there were,
[15:03] SPEAKER_03: the A form and the B form.
[15:05] SPEAKER_03: And we know that from a letter that he actually wrote in March 1953.
[15:09] SPEAKER_03: So we've got contemporary evidence.
[15:10] He did see something that excited him and made him sure that
[15:14] they could crack the problem.
[15:16] SPEAKER_03: But if it was so obvious...
[15:19] SPEAKER_03: that Jim Watson,
[15:20] SPEAKER_03: this neophyte,
[15:22] SPEAKER_03: who didn't know much about X-ray crystallography at all,
[15:25] SPEAKER_03: he was a zoologist like me,
[15:26] SPEAKER_03: he knew about birds,
[15:27] SPEAKER_03: you know?
[15:29] SPEAKER_03: If he could see it instantly,
[15:30] SPEAKER_03: then how come Rosalind Franklin,
[15:32] SPEAKER_03: this very,
[15:33] SPEAKER_03: very clever,
[15:33] SPEAKER_03: trained physical chemist,
[15:35] SPEAKER_03: how come she didn't get it?
[15:36] SPEAKER_03: So there's a problem in the story, right?
[15:38] SPEAKER_03: It doesn't quite make sense.
[15:40] SPEAKER_03: And to cut a very long story short,
[15:43] what we know from Crick's notes that he wrote in 1960 and from
[15:48] a series of
[15:50] SPEAKER_03: interviews that he did in the middle of the 1960s with Robert Olby,
[15:53] SPEAKER_03: who was the first historian to kind of track his work,
[15:57] SPEAKER_03: we know that,
[15:57] SPEAKER_03: in fact,
[15:58] SPEAKER_03: what Watson and Crick did,
[16:01] SPEAKER_03: they knew that the problem could be solved,
[16:03] SPEAKER_03: but that was more because it seemed to be a simple molecule
[16:07] unlike the proteins they were studying,
[16:08] which are horrendously complicated.
[16:10] SPEAKER_03: So that's what this,
[16:12] SPEAKER_03: whatever Watson saw,
[16:13] SPEAKER_03: it gave them the idea that it was solvable,
[16:16] SPEAKER_03: it was soluble,
[16:16] SPEAKER_03: they could do it.
[16:17] SPEAKER_03: And just using basic chemistry,
[16:20] SPEAKER_03: what was already known,
[16:20] SPEAKER_03: the chemical structure of DNA,
[16:23] SPEAKER_03: and these very simple two-dimensional models of the components,
[16:27] SPEAKER_03: the bases that they're called,
[16:30] SPEAKER_03: they fiddled around.
[16:32] SPEAKER_03: They later said it was trial and error.
[16:33] SPEAKER_03: They tried anything that would fit.
[16:35] They started off going back like Pauling with three strands and
[16:41] with the bases pointing out.
[16:43] So the strands in the middle like this and then these sticky
[16:46] things like kind of cactus.
[16:47] SPEAKER_03: And that didn't work.
[16:48] SPEAKER_03: The chemistry didn't work.
[16:49] SPEAKER_03: So they went back and they tried over and over and over and over again.
[16:53] SPEAKER_03: And eventually they get a...
[16:58] Watson is,
[17:00] they're trying to get the bases to fit on the inside,
[17:02] and it doesn't fit.
[17:04] SPEAKER_03: And Watson, literally, he turns one of these bits of cardboard over.
[17:10] SPEAKER_03: So the base looks like that, imagine.
[17:12] And then the other base that he's trying to get to fit to it,
[17:15] he turns it like that.
[17:17] SPEAKER_03: And now he can see that the four kinds of bases make two pairs.
[17:21] A and T make a shape,
[17:23] and C and G,
[17:24] as they're called,
[17:25] make the same shape.
[17:26] SPEAKER_03: So now you can imagine we've got the strands on the outside,
[17:29] SPEAKER_03: and the rungs of the ladder are always the same size.
[17:33] SPEAKER_03: Now, when they saw that,
[17:37] What Crick said was that it fitted with some evidence from
[17:41] Franklin that they had
[17:42] SPEAKER_03: been shown by their boss,
[17:44] SPEAKER_03: Max Perutz.
[17:45] And this evidence was in a semi-public report that Perutz had
[17:49] been given in December.
[17:51] SPEAKER_03: And which,
[17:52] SPEAKER_03: in fact,
[17:53] SPEAKER_03: one of the things I discovered in writing this book,
[17:56] SPEAKER_03: Franklin had kind of invited Crick to find out about.
[18:00] SPEAKER_03: Because in January, she was giving a farewell talk.
[18:04] SPEAKER_03: January of 53.
[18:05] SPEAKER_03: And she,
[18:05] SPEAKER_03: through a friend,
[18:06] SPEAKER_03: she sent a message to Crick saying,
[18:09] SPEAKER_03: you're welcome to come to this lecture,
[18:11] SPEAKER_03: but it's not going to be very,
[18:13] SPEAKER_03: not going to be much x-ray crystallographic detail.
[18:16] SPEAKER_03: And Max, Max Perutz, Crick's boss, knows all about it.
[18:20] SPEAKER_03: So you may not think it's worth coming.
[18:22] SPEAKER_03: So this isn't a smoking gun,
[18:24] SPEAKER_03: but it strongly suggests that Franklin was saying,
[18:27] SPEAKER_03: okay,
[18:28] SPEAKER_03: if you want to work on this,
[18:28] SPEAKER_03: this is okay.
[18:29] SPEAKER_03: If you want to know more, ask Max.
[18:31] SPEAKER_03: So the simple answer is nothing gave Watson and Crick the double helix.
[18:37] SPEAKER_03: It was a lot of luck.
[18:39] A lot of luck and trying anything and seeing if it would work
[18:44] and fiddling about
[18:45] SPEAKER_03: for five,
[18:45] SPEAKER_03: six weeks and...
[18:48] SPEAKER_03: then they were just incredibly lucky.
[18:50] SPEAKER_03: I think that's the real answer.
[18:52] SPEAKER_03: Is that okay?
[18:53] SPEAKER_03: It was a bit long.
[18:54] Yeah,
[18:54] I mean,
[18:55] a lot of people are going to still believe that...
[18:57] Oh,
[18:58] yeah,
[18:58] yeah,
[18:58] yeah.
[18:59] You know,
[18:59] there's that XKCD cartoon of the guy at his computer and his
[19:03] wife says,
[19:04] come to bed.
[19:05] SPEAKER_03: And he says, I can't.
[19:06] SPEAKER_03: Someone is wrong on the internet.
[19:07] SPEAKER_03: Well, that's me, right?
[19:09] Well,
[19:09] you know,
[19:10] I think the story is,
[19:12] you know,
[19:12] you got into the,
[19:13] as you say,
[19:14] into the weeds.
[19:15] SPEAKER_00: You really researched this heavily.
[19:17] SPEAKER_00: And I...
[19:18] SPEAKER_00: I understand that from all this work,
[19:21] SPEAKER_00: you've tried to clear it up and,
[19:22] SPEAKER_00: you know,
[19:23] SPEAKER_00: people will have their opinions,
[19:24] SPEAKER_00: but I think you've given us at least everything that's known about it.
[19:30] SPEAKER_00: Now, I do want to, there's a drill about this.
[19:38] SPEAKER_00: Watson wrote a book, Double Healing, and Crick didn't like the book.
[19:43] SPEAKER_00: No.
[19:44] and he basically made stuff up about going to the Eagle Pub and
[19:50] all this stuff that
[19:51] SPEAKER_00: never actually happened.
[19:52] SPEAKER_00: Can you tell us about that?
[19:54] SPEAKER_03: Yeah, well, I mean,
[19:56] SPEAKER_03: And Wilkins got very,
[19:58] SPEAKER_03: very cross about the double helix for lots of reasons,
[20:01] SPEAKER_03: partly because of the way he portrayed Franklin.
[20:05] SPEAKER_03: And Wilkins in particular,
[20:06] SPEAKER_03: although Wilkins really didn't like her,
[20:08] SPEAKER_03: was very annoyed about that,
[20:09] SPEAKER_03: and Crick was as well.
[20:11] SPEAKER_03: They were really cross because of what
[20:15] made the book success because it's written in this brilliant,
[20:19] very easygoing style.
[20:21] SPEAKER_03: You think it's all true.
[20:22] SPEAKER_03: You believe every word on the page because of the way it's written.
[20:25] And it's all Francis this and Jim that and Morris that and
[20:29] Rosalind the other.
[20:31] SPEAKER_03: So it's very intimate.
[20:32] SPEAKER_03: And that's not how science was at the time.
[20:34] SPEAKER_03: And it's not how scientists who grew up in the 1930s,
[20:38] SPEAKER_03: like Crick and Wilkins,
[20:40] SPEAKER_03: thought that science should be presented.
[20:41] SPEAKER_03: They thought that, well,
[20:43] SPEAKER_03: Well,
[20:44] SPEAKER_03: they weren't professors,
[20:45] SPEAKER_03: either of them,
[20:45] SPEAKER_03: but,
[20:45] SPEAKER_03: you know,
[20:46] SPEAKER_03: Dr.
[20:46] SPEAKER_03: Wilkins and Dr.
[20:47] SPEAKER_03: Crick,
[20:48] SPEAKER_03: if you please,
[20:49] SPEAKER_03: not Morris and Francis,
[20:51] SPEAKER_03: right?
[20:51] SPEAKER_03: And, you know, so they're a different generation.
[20:55] SPEAKER_03: They're a different nationality.
[20:57] SPEAKER_03: Neither of them was involved in teaching.
[20:59] SPEAKER_03: Jim was heavily involved with teaching with the young generation.
[21:02] SPEAKER_03: He knew that something was happening, right?
[21:03] SPEAKER_03: You know, it's fairly obvious the world was changing.
[21:06] You know,
[21:06] something is happening,
[21:07] Mr.
[21:08] Jones,
[21:08] and you don't know what it is.
[21:09] SPEAKER_03: And that's, you know, Crick and Wilkins.
[21:11] SPEAKER_03: They don't get it.
[21:12] SPEAKER_03: Whereas Jim did.
[21:14] SPEAKER_03: He understood what was happening.
[21:17] SPEAKER_03: And he therefore wrote a racy book.
[21:19] And one of the things that my friend Nathaniel Comfort has
[21:22] noticed is that through
[21:24] SPEAKER_03: the drafts,
[21:25] SPEAKER_03: Franklin changes.
[21:27] SPEAKER_03: In the early drafts, she's presented very straight.
[21:30] SPEAKER_03: And then gradually,
[21:31] SPEAKER_03: he,
[21:32] SPEAKER_03: because he,
[21:34] SPEAKER_03: I think he probably needs,
[21:35] SPEAKER_03: you know,
[21:36] SPEAKER_03: he needs,
[21:36] SPEAKER_03: he wants from a novelistic point of view,
[21:39] SPEAKER_03: he wants somebody who you can kind of put on,
[21:42] SPEAKER_03: who seems to be obtuse,
[21:44] SPEAKER_03: which he wasn't at all.
[21:45] SPEAKER_03: And so he then portrays her increasingly badly in the various drafts.
[21:50] SPEAKER_03: And there's clear echoes of this with a campus novel.
[21:55] SPEAKER_03: And once you think of it as a campus novel,
[21:58] SPEAKER_03: then these big characters,
[22:01] SPEAKER_03: which they were,
[22:02] SPEAKER_03: right,
[22:02] then you start to be a bit less confident that everything
[22:04] you're reading is true.
[22:06] SPEAKER_03: And, for example, you know, Rick always said, I never said...
[22:11] SPEAKER_03: We've discovered the secret of life.
[22:14] SPEAKER_03: And then in 2016,
[22:15] SPEAKER_03: at the centenary meeting at Cold Spring Harbor,
[22:17] SPEAKER_03: Watson said,
[22:18] SPEAKER_03: yeah,
[22:18] SPEAKER_03: I made it up for dramatic effect.
[22:20] SPEAKER_03: And he told Crick's granddaughter the same thing, you know.
[22:24] SPEAKER_03: So read the book, but don't believe it.
[22:26] SPEAKER_00: Right.
[22:27] SPEAKER_00: All right.
[22:29] So it didn't stop there,
[22:31] of course,
[22:31] regarding the birth of molecular biology.
[22:35] SPEAKER_00: I'm going to get to the 62 Nobel Prize in a minute, but
[22:39] SPEAKER_00: That was 53.
[22:41] SPEAKER_00: In 57,
[22:44] SPEAKER_00: Francis Crick took it a big step further with the central dogma,
[22:48] SPEAKER_00: and then in 61 with the codon,
[22:51] SPEAKER_00: three-letter.
[22:52] SPEAKER_00: So he wasn't happy with just structure.
[22:56] He wanted to keep up about what was the functionality of this
[23:00] double helix,
[23:01] SPEAKER_00: and that seemed to be something that was distinctly that he owned.
[23:05] SPEAKER_00: Is that true?
[23:06] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[23:06] SPEAKER_03: I think so.
[23:07] SPEAKER_03: And he,
[23:07] SPEAKER_03: I mean,
[23:07] SPEAKER_03: there are lots of people working on these topics,
[23:09] SPEAKER_03: but he's the only person who put it all together.
[23:11] SPEAKER_03: And that's what makes it even more striking.
[23:13] SPEAKER_03: I mean, so for example, messenger RNA.
[23:16] SPEAKER_03: So the intermediate between DNA and protein,
[23:19] we all know about messenger RNA now because the fantastic
[23:21] things that it's done
[23:22] SPEAKER_03: for,
[23:22] SPEAKER_03: for vaccines.
[23:23] SPEAKER_03: Um,
[23:25] SPEAKER_03: And Crick is there at the moment that it is conceptualized, it is born.
[23:29] SPEAKER_03: He and Sidney Brenner have this public,
[23:32] SPEAKER_03: or semi-public,
[23:33] SPEAKER_03: there's about 10 people in the room,
[23:34] and they start jabbering about all the various results that
[23:37] people have been
[23:38] SPEAKER_03: working on,
[23:38] SPEAKER_03: and nobody could fit them together.
[23:40] SPEAKER_03: And they suddenly realize...
[23:43] SPEAKER_03: that there's this intermediary,
[23:45] SPEAKER_03: and what happens is that it's like,
[23:48] SPEAKER_03: as they said at the time,
[23:49] SPEAKER_03: it's like a piece of tape.
[23:51] SPEAKER_03: It's like a tape.
[23:52] SPEAKER_03: This information comes from the chromosome,
[23:55] SPEAKER_03: from the DNA,
[23:56] SPEAKER_03: and then it's turned into a bit of RNA,
[23:59] SPEAKER_03: which is like a tape,
[23:59] SPEAKER_03: which then goes through the ribosome,
[24:02] SPEAKER_03: which is this structure that was a bit mysterious,
[24:05] SPEAKER_03: to help the cell make a protein.
[24:07] SPEAKER_03: And that's Crick's thinking, and it's thinking about...
[24:10] SPEAKER_03: Information.
[24:11] SPEAKER_03: That's what's in a gene.
[24:12] SPEAKER_03: It's information.
[24:13] SPEAKER_03: Now, he's not involved in doing any of the experiments.
[24:16] And other people,
[24:17] like Jim Watson,
[24:18] did do experiments that also showed that this mRNA existed.
[24:23] SPEAKER_03: And Jacob and Mono had named it, in fact.
[24:27] SPEAKER_03: But it's Crick and Brenner,
[24:29] SPEAKER_03: who actually,
[24:29] SPEAKER_03: his friend Sidney Brenner,
[24:30] SPEAKER_03: who actually have this idea.
[24:32] SPEAKER_03: So, yeah, he very much...
[24:35] SPEAKER_03: you know, pushed the field forward.
[24:38] I mean,
[24:38] there were hundreds and hundreds of people working in the area
[24:40] by now.
[24:41] SPEAKER_03: But he's the one who actually really,
[24:44] SPEAKER_03: he becomes,
[24:45] SPEAKER_03: especially after they've discovered the triplet code,
[24:48] SPEAKER_03: that it's a trip,
[24:49] SPEAKER_03: almost certainly the bases are read in three letters,
[24:52] SPEAKER_03: groups of three letters.
[24:54] And then everybody starts trying to work out what those three
[24:57] letters mean,
[24:58] SPEAKER_03: these 64 possible combinations there are.
[25:00] SPEAKER_03: He becomes like the godfather of code, I said.
[25:03] SPEAKER_03: He travels around
[25:05] SPEAKER_03: from 61 to 65, all over, mainly in America, talking to people.
[25:11] SPEAKER_03: And people send him their preprints and say, look, this is what we found.
[25:14] SPEAKER_03: He ends up as kind of a clear,
[25:15] SPEAKER_03: you know,
[25:16] SPEAKER_03: the arbiter of what should be trusted and what shouldn't.
[25:19] SPEAKER_03: Although as an experimentalist, he was generally pretty poor.
[25:24] The 1961 paper you mentioned is a very rare exception of him
[25:27] actually doing an
[25:27] SPEAKER_03: experiment and it didn't end in disaster.
[25:30] SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
[25:32] SPEAKER_00: All right,
[25:33] SPEAKER_00: so we see the big idea man in work and,
[25:37] SPEAKER_00: of course,
[25:38] getting that corroborated by others as to the functionality
[25:44] aspects of central
[25:46] SPEAKER_00: dogma and codons.
[25:48] SPEAKER_00: Now, in 62, the Nobel Prize is awarded to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins.
[25:54] SPEAKER_00: Was that the right call?
[25:57] SPEAKER_03: Well, given that Franklin was dead, yes, I think it was.
[26:01] I mean,
[26:01] ideally,
[26:02] well,
[26:03] ideally,
[26:04] Franklin would have lived much,
[26:05] much longer.
[26:07] SPEAKER_03: But she died in 1958 of ovarian cancer.
[26:10] SPEAKER_03: And the Nobel Prizes technically can't be awarded to people who are dead,
[26:16] SPEAKER_03: and so she wasn't on the list.
[26:22] SPEAKER_03: And also, they can only be awarded to three people.
[26:24] SPEAKER_03: Now, had she lived, my solution...
[26:27] whether the Nobel Prize Committee would have done this is
[26:29] another matter because we
[26:30] SPEAKER_03: know their record with women scientists.
[26:35] They could have given two people the physiology or medicine and
[26:39] two people the chemistry.
[26:40] SPEAKER_03: So they could have...
[26:42] SPEAKER_03: Noted all four.
[26:43] SPEAKER_03: And very strikingly,
[26:45] SPEAKER_03: Crick was asked to,
[26:46] SPEAKER_03: by Jacques Monod,
[26:47] SPEAKER_03: who was nominating him,
[26:48] SPEAKER_03: Crick was asked to write his own nomination,
[26:50] SPEAKER_03: basically.
[26:51] SPEAKER_03: Jacques Monod wrote to him and said, what exactly did you do?
[26:54] SPEAKER_03: Can you tell me?
[26:54] SPEAKER_03: And so Crick writes this little note.
[26:57] SPEAKER_03: And he starts off by saying,
[26:59] SPEAKER_03: you've got to remember that the key work upon which we relied,
[27:03] SPEAKER_03: because...
[27:03] SPEAKER_03: you know, they needed to be able to confirm their hypothesis with data.
[27:08] SPEAKER_03: And that came from Rosalind Franklin,
[27:10] SPEAKER_03: also from Morris Wilkins,
[27:11] SPEAKER_03: but primarily it was from Franklin.
[27:12] SPEAKER_03: And so he says that in his first,
[27:14] SPEAKER_03: uh,
[27:15] SPEAKER_03: opening paragraph in this little letter to,
[27:17] SPEAKER_03: uh,
[27:17] SPEAKER_03: to Jacques Monod saying how it all happened.
[27:19] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[27:20] SPEAKER_00: Now before that,
[27:21] SPEAKER_00: uh,
[27:22] SPEAKER_00: Nobel prize,
[27:23] SPEAKER_00: which I think you summed up well,
[27:25] SPEAKER_00: you know,
[27:26] SPEAKER_00: who,
[27:27] SPEAKER_00: how it was recognized,
[27:28] SPEAKER_00: how it wasn't.
[27:29] SPEAKER_00: Uh, but there was a poem that, uh,
[27:33] Francis Crick,
[27:35] I guess,
[27:35] stumbled into on a trip in San Francisco in 1959.
[27:40] SPEAKER_00: McClure, can you tell us about that poem and how it influenced Crick?
[27:47] SPEAKER_03: Yeah,
[27:48] SPEAKER_03: well,
[27:48] SPEAKER_03: I mean,
[27:49] SPEAKER_03: so this is something that wasn't known by...
[27:52] SPEAKER_03: So there are two other biographies of Crick,
[27:55] SPEAKER_03: both of which I think are pretty good.
[27:57] SPEAKER_03: There's Robert Olby's very academic one,
[27:59] SPEAKER_03: which would tell you an awful lot about X-ray crystallography.
[28:02] And there's Matt Ridley's,
[28:04] much briefer,
[28:05] very polished,
[28:06] written very soon after Crick died.
[28:08] SPEAKER_03: And they both interviewed Crick loads of times, which I never did.
[28:10] SPEAKER_03: I never met him.
[28:12] SPEAKER_03: But they didn't pick up on this.
[28:14] And indeed,
[28:15] none of his colleagues who knew him very well who were still
[28:18] living...
[28:19] had ever any idea of this connection so in 1959 crick is there
[28:24] in finishing a
[28:25] sabbatical in in america he's in uh staying in in berkeley and
[28:30] he goes into san
[28:30] francisco they go to go to the city lights bookstore which is
[28:34] still there the heart
[28:35] of the beat movement and he goes because he's interested in
[28:37] poetry he goes down
[28:38] SPEAKER_03: into the basement which is where all the poems are and he finds this long
[28:42] SPEAKER_03: broadsheet this thing that is i mean it's it's huge
[28:45] SPEAKER_03: This very strange poem written by this guy called Michael McClure.
[28:51] SPEAKER_03: And it's called Peyote Poem.
[28:53] SPEAKER_03: And it describes the effects of eating peyote,
[28:56] SPEAKER_03: which is the active ingredient of which is mescaline.
[28:59] SPEAKER_03: So just as Aldous Huxley had written,
[29:01] SPEAKER_03: you know,
[29:01] SPEAKER_03: The Doors of Perception about six years earlier...
[29:05] SPEAKER_03: What McClure is doing is giving a very vivid poetic expression to it.
[29:09] SPEAKER_03: And Crick is utterly entranced by this very strange piece of poetry.
[29:13] Buys this very now extremely rare document,
[29:17] takes it home,
[29:17] pins it on the wall.
[29:18] Later on,
[29:19] it's next to a copy of the genetic code,
[29:23] which he helped to crack.
[29:25] SPEAKER_03: And so this is, I thought, this is astonishing.
[29:27] SPEAKER_03: What is going on here?
[29:28] SPEAKER_03: And in fact, he ends up very good friends with McClure.
[29:30] SPEAKER_03: And...
[29:33] SPEAKER_03: McClure's kind of psychedelic beat poetry is very muscular.
[29:37] SPEAKER_03: It's got lots about biology and animals, and they really hit it off.
[29:44] What Crick liked about McClure is this kind of ecstatic
[29:47] experience that he
[29:48] SPEAKER_03: describes in all his poems,
[29:51] SPEAKER_03: which,
[29:52] SPEAKER_03: I mean,
[29:52] SPEAKER_03: Crick later on went on to smoke cannabis.
[29:57] SPEAKER_03: He took LSD a number of times.
[29:58] SPEAKER_03: He may have taken mescaline or even eaten peyote.
[30:02] SPEAKER_03: I don't know about that.
[30:03] But I think what he got was the ecstatic experience of
[30:10] discovery,
[30:11] of knowledge,
[30:11] of insight.
[30:13] SPEAKER_03: There was one particular stanza which Crick loved,
[30:16] SPEAKER_03: which went...
[30:18] SPEAKER_03: You've got to imagine this in capital letters and italics.
[30:20] SPEAKER_03: So I guess it's got to be yelled in tone.
[30:23] SPEAKER_03: This is the powerful knowledge.
[30:25] SPEAKER_03: Wow.
[30:25] SPEAKER_03: We smile with it.
[30:28] SPEAKER_03: And this was all said by the man who is the god of foxes or something.
[30:32] SPEAKER_03: I mean, the poem is fantastic.
[30:33] SPEAKER_03: You can find it on the internet.
[30:35] SPEAKER_03: Don't try to understand what it means.
[30:36] SPEAKER_03: Just read it out loud and really get into it.
[30:39] SPEAKER_00: I had to read it because I was so curious.
[30:42] SPEAKER_00: Written by a person who's on drugs.
[30:44] SPEAKER_00: Now, Crick was a drug user.
[30:48] SPEAKER_00: Did he do psychedelics or other drugs with McClure?
[30:53] SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
[30:53] SPEAKER_03: I mean, somebody was asked me this today on Blue Sky.
[30:57] SPEAKER_03: They said, you know, is there much about psychedelics in this?
[30:59] SPEAKER_03: I said,
[30:59] SPEAKER_03: well,
[31:00] it starts with that and closes in a way because it closes with
[31:03] a rather nice poem
[31:04] SPEAKER_03: that McClure wrote for him,
[31:06] SPEAKER_03: finished on the day of his death in 2004.
[31:08] SPEAKER_03: So I put in as much as I could find, but there's very, very little.
[31:13] SPEAKER_03: We know that he signed,
[31:17] SPEAKER_03: along with all four Beatles,
[31:18] SPEAKER_03: a petition for the legalization of cannabis in 1967,
[31:22] SPEAKER_03: which was very,
[31:24] SPEAKER_03: very scandalous at the time.
[31:25] SPEAKER_03: He was the only fellow of the Royal Society to sign it.
[31:28] SPEAKER_03: And he was very, an ardent defender of that idea.
[31:31] SPEAKER_03: And he used cannabis quite regularly, I think.
[31:34] SPEAKER_03: LSD, not quite so often.
[31:37] But certainly in the second half of the 60s,
[31:40] that was something that he...
[31:42] experimented with and enjoyed or was fascinated by its effects
[31:46] on perception
[31:47] because his interest was moving away from molecular genetics
[31:51] towards thinking about
[31:52] SPEAKER_03: that other great issue,
[31:54] SPEAKER_03: the consciousness.
[31:55] SPEAKER_03: And now we've got this drug which is not just,
[31:57] SPEAKER_03: you know,
[31:58] SPEAKER_03: changing the way alcohol or caffeine changes your mind,
[32:01] SPEAKER_03: but this is completely altering your perception.
[32:04] SPEAKER_03: And that, I think, intrigued him a great deal.
[32:07] SPEAKER_00: Well,
[32:07] SPEAKER_00: that's a perfect segue to the next pivot of Crick's life,
[32:12] SPEAKER_00: the first one being from physics to molecular biology.
[32:15] And as you said,
[32:16] even in 1947,
[32:17] he knew he was going to get to consciousness.
[32:20] SPEAKER_00: And so he's forced into retirement from MRC in Cambridge,
[32:25] SPEAKER_00: and somehow he lands in La Jolla at the Salk Institute.
[32:29] SPEAKER_00: I guess also perhaps his friend Sidney Brenner played a role in that.
[32:34] SPEAKER_00: But he now is going to eventually,
[32:38] SPEAKER_00: after he gets legs on this because it wasn't right straight away,
[32:41] SPEAKER_00: at the Salk Institute,
[32:42] SPEAKER_00: he's going to start a career in understanding consciousness,
[32:45] SPEAKER_00: right?
[32:46] SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
[32:47] SPEAKER_00: And this culminates...
[32:50] SPEAKER_00: with his work of Christoph Koch in a book, The Astonishing Hypothesis.
[32:55] SPEAKER_00: It's actually astonishing, The Scientific Search for the Soul.
[33:00] SPEAKER_00: And this,
[33:01] SPEAKER_00: to me,
[33:02] SPEAKER_00: there's the text in that book where it says,
[33:07] SPEAKER_00: you,
[33:08] SPEAKER_00: your joys and your sorrows,
[33:09] SPEAKER_00: your memories and your ambitions,
[33:11] SPEAKER_00: your sense of personal identity and free will are,
[33:13] SPEAKER_00: in fact,
[33:14] SPEAKER_00: no more
[33:15] than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their
[33:19] associated molecules.
[33:20] SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, that's an astonishing hypothesis, right?
[33:24] SPEAKER_03: Well, I mean, yes and no.
[33:26] SPEAKER_03: He says something like,
[33:26] SPEAKER_03: you're nothing but a pack of neurons,
[33:28] SPEAKER_03: which is taken from Alice in Wonderland or Alice in Looking Glass.
[33:34] SPEAKER_03: I can't remember which.
[33:35] SPEAKER_03: The one where the Queen of Hearts and all the cards are attacking her.
[33:39] SPEAKER_03: And she says, you're nothing but a pack of cards and they all disappear.
[33:42] SPEAKER_03: So Crick is saying, we're nothing but a pack of neurons.
[33:45] And in fact,
[33:45] a folk singer wrote a song about it,
[33:47] which he was very taken with.
[33:49] SPEAKER_03: So, I mean, it is astonishing.
[33:53] On the other hand,
[33:54] it's what I think most neuroscientists would have said.
[33:57] SPEAKER_03: There is no soul or there's certainly no spirit.
[34:00] SPEAKER_03: The word soul in the title is a bit of a cheat.
[34:03] SPEAKER_03: It was partly there to...
[34:04] SPEAKER_03: to get people to buy it.
[34:06] SPEAKER_03: I mean, there's very little about the soul in the book.
[34:09] He says something like,
[34:10] I mean,
[34:11] so he was an agnostic with very strong atheist tendencies.
[34:15] SPEAKER_03: I think like most scientists, you know, who would claim to be atheists.
[34:19] SPEAKER_03: In fact, they're really an agnostic because, you know,
[34:21] SPEAKER_03: just maybe this possibility, but there's no evidence.
[34:24] SPEAKER_03: So what he said was,
[34:26] SPEAKER_03: when we've understood consciousness,
[34:27] SPEAKER_03: then we'll know whether there's anything left over,
[34:30] SPEAKER_03: right?
[34:30] If there's something missing,
[34:31] then maybe that could be a soul,
[34:33] but that's it.
[34:34] SPEAKER_03: So really what he's doing is trying to sum up
[34:37] SPEAKER_03: of materialist approaches to thought,
[34:39] SPEAKER_03: to the mind,
[34:41] SPEAKER_03: to brain function,
[34:42] SPEAKER_03: which,
[34:43] SPEAKER_03: I mean,
[34:44] SPEAKER_03: his editor got cross with him and said,
[34:45] SPEAKER_03: why is this astonishing?
[34:47] SPEAKER_03: Doesn't everybody think this?
[34:48] SPEAKER_03: And he basically said,
[34:49] you need to get out more and talk to religious people because
[34:52] religious people will
[34:52] SPEAKER_03: get very cross with you.
[34:54] SPEAKER_03: You know, and that's who he's aiming at.
[34:56] SPEAKER_03: So most of the book is a summary of neuroscience as it stood at the time.
[35:01] SPEAKER_03: And although it's out of print now,
[35:04] SPEAKER_03: It was extremely influential.
[35:06] I was very surprised at quite the huge impact it had on both
[35:09] sides of the Atlantic.
[35:11] I've met eminent neuroscience who said,
[35:13] that's what got me into neuroscience.
[35:15] SPEAKER_03: I read that and I was inspired.
[35:18] SPEAKER_03: It was a huge thing in the UK.
[35:21] SPEAKER_03: It went to the top of the bestseller.
[35:23] SPEAKER_03: The Times had a
[35:25] SPEAKER_03: a front-page article comparing him with Mozart and Shakespeare.
[35:30] SPEAKER_03: It's not just Newton and Mendel.
[35:32] SPEAKER_03: We're now talking about Mozart and Shakespeare.
[35:35] SPEAKER_03: It's quite extraordinary.
[35:38] SPEAKER_03: And in a way, I think this is telling us that something's happened.
[35:43] SPEAKER_03: I've got to think about this.
[35:45] SPEAKER_03: Who today, what individual scientist would you name today?
[35:50] SPEAKER_03: as being somebody incredibly famous and influential.
[35:52] SPEAKER_03: Probably Fauci in the US would be one of the people you could talk about.
[35:57] SPEAKER_03: But there are very few such eminent individual scientists.
[36:02] SPEAKER_03: The people we think are scientists are in fact science communicators.
[36:06] SPEAKER_03: they may have a scientific training,
[36:07] SPEAKER_03: but when they're talking about something,
[36:09] SPEAKER_03: they're not talking about their work.
[36:11] And there's very few books by scientists or TV programs or
[36:15] whatever simply about
[36:16] SPEAKER_03: their work that have had such an influence.
[36:19] And that's partly because science is more complicated,
[36:21] it's done by teams,
[36:22] but...
[36:24] SPEAKER_03: But it's also,
[36:25] SPEAKER_03: and people are wary of,
[36:26] SPEAKER_03: you know,
[36:26] SPEAKER_03: great men and all the rest of it,
[36:27] SPEAKER_03: which is all fair enough.
[36:30] SPEAKER_03: But there's something else has changed,
[36:31] SPEAKER_03: I think,
[36:31] in our attitude towards scientists and their willingness to put
[36:36] themselves to the
[36:38] SPEAKER_03: fore in arguing their science and explaining it and so on.
[36:42] SPEAKER_03: And it tends to be mediated now by kind of,
[36:45] SPEAKER_03: you know,
[36:45] SPEAKER_03: TV figures or TikTok influences or sub-stackers or whatever.
[36:49] SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
[36:50] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, I mean, he may have taken some
[36:54] SPEAKER_00: lessons from Watson.
[36:55] But for the most part,
[36:57] scientists kept to science,
[36:59] and they didn't appeal to the public.
[37:01] And they certainly didn't come up with things that were more to
[37:07] get people
[37:07] interested in their work outside of their microcosm of the
[37:10] science community.
[37:12] SPEAKER_00: Now, he came to the Salk Institute in 76, and
[37:16] SPEAKER_03: That book.
[37:17] SPEAKER_03: Yeah, he'd worked there.
[37:18] SPEAKER_03: He'd been a founder member.
[37:19] SPEAKER_03: He'd been a founder fellow.
[37:20] So he was recruited specially by Jonas Salk as being kind of a
[37:25] special fellow whose
[37:26] job was to find new people who would be permanent researchers
[37:30] working at the Salk.
[37:30] SPEAKER_03: So he'd been in,
[37:32] SPEAKER_03: for about 10 years,
[37:33] he kind of had like dual membership and he had to travel a
[37:36] great deal when he found
[37:37] SPEAKER_03: exhausting.
[37:38] SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
[37:38] SPEAKER_03: But in 76, he moves there permanently and is, yeah.
[37:42] SPEAKER_00: And then it was 94 when this book came out, The Astonishing Hypothesis.
[37:46] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[37:47] SPEAKER_00: He worked on science.
[37:51] SPEAKER_00: He was editing papers to this very last day.
[37:53] SPEAKER_00: I mean,
[37:54] he had colon cancer diagnosed in 2001 and three years into that
[37:58] diagnosis when he
[37:59] SPEAKER_00: ultimately died.
[38:00] But he was working on science and papers and editing even to
[38:05] his last day.
[38:06] SPEAKER_00: Is that true?
[38:07] SPEAKER_03: That's absolutely right.
[38:08] SPEAKER_03: You can see in the archives,
[38:10] there is the manuscript of this book article he was writing
[38:13] with Christoph Koch on
[38:16] SPEAKER_03: the claustrum,
[38:17] SPEAKER_03: which is this very thin,
[38:19] SPEAKER_03: rather mysterious layer in the brain,
[38:21] SPEAKER_03: which they didn't think was the seat of consciousness,
[38:23] SPEAKER_03: but they thought it was doing something interesting.
[38:25] Crick would look for anatomical structures that could perhaps
[38:29] play some kind of intermediate or
[38:32] relay role or some gathering of information role in case that
[38:36] might be as they put
[38:38] it you know the site of neural correlates of consciousness not
[38:42] necessarily where it
[38:44] is but something that's consistently linked to it and on the
[38:49] manuscript you know
[38:50] SPEAKER_03: you've got his very very shaky hand as he's changing words here and there
[38:54] Christoph had to spend quite a few months afterwards knocking
[38:58] it into shape because
[38:58] SPEAKER_03: it still was a bit strange.
[39:00] SPEAKER_03: But eventually it was published in 2005.
[39:01] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I mean, it's quite extraordinary.
[39:06] So we have here the hunter of life secrets and spawning in many
[39:13] ways two huge
[39:14] SPEAKER_00: fields,
[39:15] SPEAKER_00: molecular biology,
[39:16] SPEAKER_00: and then he pivoted over to neuroscience.
[39:19] And in fact,
[39:19] if you could say the whole AI world of today is really
[39:22] fascinating
[39:24] SPEAKER_00: the same kind of theme of it's all about these neurons,
[39:27] SPEAKER_00: whether they're human neurons or artificial neurons and networks.
[39:34] So what he did,
[39:36] the legacy in science of two huge fields that he- Yeah,
[39:42] absolutely.
[39:44] SPEAKER_03: I mean, he ended up, I mean, again, he was lucky.
[39:47] He was in the right place at the right time,
[39:49] just like he was in Cambridge.
[39:50] SPEAKER_03: He was,
[39:51] SPEAKER_03: because he was in San Diego,
[39:53] that was the site of something called the Parallel Distributed
[39:56] Programme Group,
[39:57] SPEAKER_03: which was a set of information scientists,
[40:00] SPEAKER_03: computer scientists,
[40:01] SPEAKER_03: psychologists.
[40:03] who tried to bring all this together,
[40:05] and this is the embryo of today's AIs.
[40:09] SPEAKER_03: And Geoffrey Hinton,
[40:11] SPEAKER_03: who co-won the Nobel Prize,
[40:13] SPEAKER_03: and John Hopfield,
[40:14] SPEAKER_03: who co-won the Nobel Prize in 2024 for their work,
[40:19] SPEAKER_03: They were intimately linked with Crick and with this broader group.
[40:23] SPEAKER_03: And he wasn't involved in doing any of the program.
[40:25] I found a rather sad letter from him saying he was trying to
[40:28] learn basic when he was about 70.
[40:30] SPEAKER_03: And it was really, really hard and he couldn't do it, you know.
[40:34] SPEAKER_03: But he would be sitting there.
[40:36] SPEAKER_03: They'd have these meetings in San Diego and at the university.
[40:40] And he'd sit at the back on a sofa and he'd kind of be very
[40:43] annoying and saying,
[40:44] SPEAKER_03: well,
[40:44] SPEAKER_03: this is very well,
[40:45] SPEAKER_03: but what about the biology?
[40:47] So one of the issues that we still have today was being played
[40:51] out there with Crick
[40:52] SPEAKER_03: on the sofa saying,
[40:53] SPEAKER_03: look,
[40:54] SPEAKER_03: if you want this to tell you about the brain,
[40:56] SPEAKER_03: it's got to be biologically significant.
[40:58] SPEAKER_03: And if you're relying on ways of these
[41:01] components interacting that is biologically impossible,
[41:05] then that's going to be great.
[41:05] You're going to have a fantastic system,
[41:07] but it won't tell you about biology.
[41:09] SPEAKER_03: And that was what he was always,
[41:11] he wanted to link structure and function in a realistic and
[41:14] scientific way.
[41:16] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, it's phenomenal.
[41:17] SPEAKER_00: Now, I do want to talk a little bit about Odile and Michael's family.
[41:23] SPEAKER_00: I mean,
[41:25] SPEAKER_00: they were married 55 years,
[41:26] SPEAKER_00: despite some might be considered an open marriage,
[41:29] SPEAKER_00: but also Odile
[41:31] drew the picture,
[41:32] the graphic,
[41:34] for the classic nature 1953 paper,
[41:37] which was amazing.
[41:39] And he wrote to Michael's son right around the discovery about
[41:44] how this beautiful structure.
[41:45] SPEAKER_00: I mean, his son, Michael, was like 12 or something at the time.
[41:49] SPEAKER_00: That's right, yeah.
[41:50] SPEAKER_03: I mean,
[41:51] I think that's his experience with the children's encyclopedia
[41:55] comes out because
[41:56] SPEAKER_03: the letter is just so clear.
[41:57] SPEAKER_03: I mean, he was lucky, right?
[41:59] It's one of the things about DNA that people forget is that
[42:02] most molecular
[42:03] SPEAKER_03: structures tell you nothing.
[42:05] SPEAKER_03: It's impossible to see what the function is, right?
[42:07] If you see a hemoglobin molecule,
[42:09] you cannot look at it and go,
[42:11] aha,
[42:11] that's carrying oxygen.
[42:13] SPEAKER_03: It just doesn't look like that.
[42:14] SPEAKER_03: The double helix is...
[42:16] SPEAKER_03: is almost,
[42:16] SPEAKER_03: I think,
[42:17] SPEAKER_03: actually unique in that you can immediately see what its function,
[42:21] SPEAKER_03: the link between function and structure.
[42:23] SPEAKER_03: And you can explain it to a 12-year-old,
[42:25] SPEAKER_03: as Crick did,
[42:26] to his son in this very famous letter that Michael eventually
[42:30] auctioned and gave a
[42:31] SPEAKER_03: lot of the money to the Salk Institute for.
[42:33] SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and so anything else about his family that you want to mention?
[42:38] SPEAKER_03: Well, his granddaughter, Kindra, is a neuroscientist and an artist.
[42:42] She's a very famous artist,
[42:43] so she's kind of fused the two sides of the family.
[42:46] Michael,
[42:47] who is from Crick's first marriage,
[42:50] went on to work for Microsoft.
[42:52] So apparently,
[42:53] spell check,
[42:54] if you get cross with that in word,
[42:56] that's Michael's fault.
[42:58] SPEAKER_03: And Gabrielle, his surviving daughter,
[43:01] SPEAKER_03: is a very accomplished artist who lives in London.
[43:05] SPEAKER_03: So that fusion of art and science,
[43:07] SPEAKER_03: which was part of the Crick's marriage,
[43:09] SPEAKER_03: I mean,
[43:09] SPEAKER_03: Odile did draw the double helix,
[43:11] SPEAKER_03: but she drew figures from many of his papers,
[43:14] SPEAKER_03: including this very strange one of mermaids intertwined with...
[43:20] that Crick used to explain something rather complicated about
[43:23] X-ray crystallography
[43:24] SPEAKER_03: in the 1950s.
[43:26] SPEAKER_03: And, you know, their house was full of art, always had art around it.
[43:31] SPEAKER_03: It was mainly O'Deal who chose it,
[43:33] SPEAKER_03: but Francis was very interested in that,
[43:35] SPEAKER_03: and poetry,
[43:36] SPEAKER_03: and also these parties that were very wild in Cambridge,
[43:40] SPEAKER_03: and I think were probably a bit calmer in San Diego.
[43:43] SPEAKER_03: I'm not sure people would have approved that.
[43:45] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[43:47] SPEAKER_00: I'm only a few blocks away from the Salk Institute at Scripps.
[43:51] Obviously,
[43:52] Crick was a legend,
[43:53] and I hear all kinds of stories,
[43:55] and he would have parties.
[43:57] SPEAKER_00: But also,
[43:58] SPEAKER_00: they had the place in Borrega Springs,
[44:00] SPEAKER_00: which is just over an hour away in the desert,
[44:03] SPEAKER_00: and they would be there quite a bit.
[44:07] SPEAKER_00: had the best of both worlds, the ocean and the desert.
[44:10] SPEAKER_00: And I think he really loved the Salk Institute.
[44:13] SPEAKER_03: Oh, he adored it.
[44:14] SPEAKER_03: I mean, I didn't make perhaps enough.
[44:17] SPEAKER_03: I did think about this,
[44:19] SPEAKER_03: partly because this is something that historians are interested in,
[44:21] SPEAKER_03: place.
[44:22] SPEAKER_03: So, his life is also a story of two subjects, but it's also two places.
[44:27] It's Cambridge,
[44:28] where he was able to do his molecular work,
[44:30] but it's also the salt.
[44:31] The salt was incredibly important to him in giving him a
[44:35] connection with American
[44:36] SPEAKER_03: science,
[44:37] SPEAKER_03: which,
[44:37] SPEAKER_03: of course,
[44:37] SPEAKER_03: is the powerhouse of...
[44:40] The work he was interested in,
[44:41] most of it,
[44:42] the really important work was being done in the USA.
[44:45] And the salt by those regular visits gave him that contact and
[44:48] then eventually
[44:50] SPEAKER_03: becoming a full-time fellow.
[44:51] SPEAKER_03: And he said he never felt, he never took American citizenship.
[44:55] SPEAKER_03: He didn't feel American.
[44:57] SPEAKER_03: But he did feel Californian.
[45:00] SPEAKER_03: And he loved Southern California.
[45:02] And they built this house in the desert in Berigo Springs in
[45:07] 1992 or something.
[45:08] SPEAKER_03: Francis designed it.
[45:09] SPEAKER_03: He'd always had a penchant for designing houses and stuff like that.
[45:12] amateur architect and it's very carefully designed so that on
[45:17] the basis apparently
[45:18] of a Japanese inn so each window you don't look onto another
[45:23] room you look onto
[45:23] this central area which was there was a patch of bare desert so
[45:28] there's lots and
[45:29] lots of lovely flowers because he adored gardening but there's
[45:32] also a patch of bare
[45:33] SPEAKER_03: desert as a memory or you know a memory of what was
[45:38] SPEAKER_03: but also a hint of what was going to come eventually.
[45:42] SPEAKER_03: It'll all go back to desert.
[45:44] And they built this house and the colors and so on,
[45:47] the sunsets is what he adored.
[45:51] And I realized that that would be very...
[45:55] Michael McClure went to visit them a number of times.
[45:58] That kind of just the sensation,
[46:00] the visual sensation and the heat and the smells...
[46:04] uh of the the desert flowers that would all fit in with
[46:07] mcclure's very very sensual
[46:10] poetic understanding that that was part of crick which you
[46:13] don't get from reading
[46:14] his scientific papers you don't get this much more intimate and
[46:18] and sensual side of
[46:19] SPEAKER_03: of somebody which you can relate to because you know we all you may not
[46:23] SPEAKER_03: particularly like mcclure's poetry or we might but we can all understand
[46:28] SPEAKER_03: that joy, the fun he found in the world and in understanding it.
[46:34] Well,
[46:35] that's what this book accomplishes,
[46:37] that you bring him back to life.
[46:40] You're an intimate portrait of a man who had profound influence
[46:45] in life science,
[46:46] SPEAKER_00: but also his foibles,
[46:49] SPEAKER_00: his creates.
[46:51] SPEAKER_00: You don't hold back on these.
[46:54] SPEAKER_00: Now,
[46:56] SPEAKER_00: In the UK, there's a famous institute, the Crick.
[47:00] SPEAKER_00: And the Crick, obviously, we know Crick who cracked the code or whatever.
[47:05] Crick,
[47:06] you know,
[47:07] has this unbelievably distinguished track record in
[47:12] contribution to science.
[47:15] And some people would have,
[47:18] you know,
[47:19] a negative perception of him as well.
[47:22] SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's that mixed, right?
[47:23] SPEAKER_00: It's hard to the good and the bad.
[47:26] SPEAKER_00: So can you tell us about the Crick?
[47:30] And that is,
[47:31] I guess,
[47:31] a singular institute identified with his contributions,
[47:37] right?
[47:38] SPEAKER_03: Yeah,
[47:38] SPEAKER_03: I mean,
[47:39] SPEAKER_03: I should preface it by saying if anybody asks my advice,
[47:42] SPEAKER_03: which they don't,
[47:43] SPEAKER_03: I wouldn't advise naming a building or an institute after an individual.
[47:48] SPEAKER_03: It's just kind of fraught with dangers.
[47:50] You don't know what the future's going to hold because,
[47:52] you know,
[47:52] opinions change.
[47:54] And what can be seen as acceptable in one generation is seen as
[47:57] utterly awful in another.
[48:00] Now,
[48:01] so the Crick was set up,
[48:03] I think it was opened in 2008,
[48:05] something like that,
[48:06] 2009.
[48:07] SPEAKER_03: It's a huge, great big building right by King's Cross and St Pancras.
[48:12] SPEAKER_03: So if you've been in Europe and you come in on the Eurostar, the train...
[48:17] SPEAKER_03: under the channel,
[48:18] you can come out right next to the Francis Crick Institute
[48:22] where his name is
[48:23] SPEAKER_03: literally written in stone.
[48:26] And so it's devoted to molecular biology and to neuroscience,
[48:29] to the life sciences in general.
[48:32] SPEAKER_03: And it...
[48:33] SPEAKER_03: I mean,
[48:33] SPEAKER_03: when it was being proposed,
[48:35] SPEAKER_03: before it was called this,
[48:35] SPEAKER_03: there was a lot of dispute in the British scientific community.
[48:39] SPEAKER_03: Was it going to just suck up all our money, right?
[48:41] SPEAKER_03: You know, they were putting all this money into this big project.
[48:45] SPEAKER_03: And it's in London as well.
[48:46] SPEAKER_03: So those of us who aren't in London got very annoyed.
[48:49] SPEAKER_03: But I think it has so far proven its worth.
[48:53] SPEAKER_03: It's run by Sir Paul Nurse, who used to...
[48:55] SPEAKER_03: run Rockefeller and is also the incoming president of the Royal Society.
[49:00] SPEAKER_03: And it has been tremendous in terms of the work that it's done,
[49:03] SPEAKER_03: both on things like early embryonic development.
[49:07] So there's great,
[49:08] very important work going on to understand why miscarriages
[49:12] take place.
[49:13] And to understand,
[49:13] therefore,
[49:14] the very early stages of embryonic development.
[49:17] SPEAKER_03: But also fundamental research on,
[49:19] SPEAKER_03: so what I spent all my career studying on Drosophila,
[49:22] SPEAKER_03: the tiny little fly that scientists study.
[49:25] SPEAKER_03: There's scientists working on that,
[49:27] SPEAKER_03: not in a biomedical orientation,
[49:29] SPEAKER_03: but just trying to understand fundamental things.
[49:32] SPEAKER_03: There's people working on ancient DNA.
[49:34] SPEAKER_03: You know, there's absolutely everything goes on there.
[49:38] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's actually striking.
[49:40] SPEAKER_00: In fact,
[49:41] Demis Sabis of Google DeepMind has set up collaborations with
[49:46] the Crick on drug
[49:48] SPEAKER_00: discovery with AI labs and whatnot.
[49:51] SPEAKER_00: Now, it started just before Crick died.
[49:57] SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
[49:59] SPEAKER_03: They started talking about the funding.
[50:00] SPEAKER_03: They didn't name it, Bill, after he was there.
[50:03] SPEAKER_00: But he probably would be quite proud of it if he was here today.
[50:08] SPEAKER_03: Well, a mixture.
[50:09] SPEAKER_03: I mean, he was very private.
[50:10] SPEAKER_03: Okay, so I felt...
[50:12] SPEAKER_03: I mean, all biographers feel this.
[50:13] SPEAKER_03: This is the first biography I've written.
[50:15] SPEAKER_03: I'm not sure I'm going to write another one.
[50:16] SPEAKER_03: Certainly not about one where there are people who are still alive.
[50:20] SPEAKER_03: Because, you know, you spend a lot... You be your terrible nosy parker.
[50:24] SPEAKER_03: You go around rummaging around in people's private lives.
[50:27] SPEAKER_03: The family is not an authorized biography,
[50:30] SPEAKER_03: but the family have been amazingly tolerant for me,
[50:33] SPEAKER_03: digging around,
[50:35] SPEAKER_03: including in the less salubrious aspects of their father's life or their
[50:39] SPEAKER_03: grandfather's life,
[50:40] SPEAKER_03: which...
[50:40] understandably they don't they're not particularly proud of and
[50:43] wouldn't want
[50:43] people to to focus on i don't think they should um but they've
[50:47] been amazingly
[50:48] supportive and tolerant of that um so he was very very private
[50:53] and that's one of
[50:53] the things he didn't like about the double helix because it i
[50:55] mean if you read the
[50:56] SPEAKER_03: double helix with the eyes if you read carefully it's all there
[51:01] Crick's penchant for parties,
[51:04] for womanizing,
[51:05] you know,
[51:06] his lecherie is all there.
[51:10] Jim hints at it and,
[51:12] you know,
[51:12] you read it and then you go,
[51:14] oh,
[51:14] this is what it's saying.
[51:15] SPEAKER_03: So Francis wasn't happy about that, understandably so.
[51:18] SPEAKER_03: And...
[51:20] SPEAKER_03: I think he would be proud,
[51:21] SPEAKER_03: but I think...
[51:22] SPEAKER_03: I mean,
[51:23] SPEAKER_03: he said in something like...
[51:24] SPEAKER_03: In the millennium,
[51:26] SPEAKER_03: the Wedgwood Plate Company,
[51:28] SPEAKER_03: they make porcelain plates.
[51:30] They wanted to have a picture of all the great discoverers of
[51:34] science of the millennium.
[51:36] SPEAKER_03: And Crick wasn't happy, and he said, well, I think...
[51:38] SPEAKER_03: the discovery is more important than the individual.
[51:41] SPEAKER_03: And they went for the object.
[51:43] SPEAKER_03: So at 12 o'clock was the double helix, which he was very happy about.
[51:47] So he thought that,
[51:50] and in general,
[51:51] actually,
[51:51] that's,
[51:52] in a way,
[51:52] it's true,
[51:53] right?
[51:53] SPEAKER_03: Because, I mean, you know, we discover things.
[51:56] SPEAKER_03: I mean, you discovered a lot more important things than I have.
[51:59] My discoveries are fairly minor,
[52:01] and,
[52:01] you know,
[52:02] somebody else would have made them.
[52:03] SPEAKER_03: You know, if I wasn't here, it's nothing terribly important.
[52:06] SPEAKER_03: That's the nature of science.
[52:07] SPEAKER_03: We all make tiny little contributions.
[52:10] SPEAKER_03: And that's true of the double helix.
[52:12] SPEAKER_03: I think if Watson and Crick hadn't found it,
[52:13] SPEAKER_03: then,
[52:13] SPEAKER_03: you know,
[52:14] SPEAKER_03: it would have been discovered in a few months by somebody,
[52:17] SPEAKER_03: by Wilkins or by Franklin or by Pauling or somebody would have found it.
[52:21] SPEAKER_03: But individuals do make a difference.
[52:24] SPEAKER_03: And that's to go back to our starting point.
[52:27] SPEAKER_03: His thinking, his way of thinking about what DNA meant and his...
[52:33] SPEAKER_03: his ability to then focus much later on on consciousness.
[52:37] SPEAKER_03: I mean,
[52:37] SPEAKER_03: he created the field of consciousness studies as a scientific field,
[52:40] SPEAKER_03: not as a philosophical,
[52:42] SPEAKER_01: you know,
[52:43] SPEAKER_03: pipe-sucking,
[52:44] SPEAKER_03: musing on what life might be like.
[52:48] SPEAKER_03: So individuals do count as well.
[52:50] SPEAKER_03: It's quite complicated, the history of science.
[52:52] SPEAKER_03: So, I mean, I think I have no problem with them naming it after him.
[52:57] SPEAKER_03: You know,
[52:57] SPEAKER_03: every now and again,
[52:58] SPEAKER_03: people get cross when they discover stuff that's on his Wikipedia page.
[53:02] SPEAKER_02: Right.
[53:02] SPEAKER_03: And the clique have got a clear kind of disclaimer,
[53:06] SPEAKER_03: which I think is fair enough,
[53:07] SPEAKER_03: saying,
[53:07] SPEAKER_03: you know,
[53:07] SPEAKER_03: he was a great scientist.
[53:08] SPEAKER_03: We don't subscribe to all his views, which is fair enough.
[53:11] SPEAKER_00: Well,
[53:11] SPEAKER_00: it's a very,
[53:12] SPEAKER_00: the reason I brought it up in part was because here,
[53:15] SPEAKER_00: not far from the Salk Institute,
[53:16] SPEAKER_00: is the Venter Institute that Craig Venter did for himself.
[53:20] SPEAKER_00: Okay.
[53:20] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[53:21] SPEAKER_00: A little different.
[53:23] SPEAKER_00: A little different.
[53:24] SPEAKER_00: Okay.
[53:24] SPEAKER_03: I think they're rather different characters.
[53:26] SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
[53:27] SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes, absolutely.
[53:30] SPEAKER_00: We won't go into that any more depth.
[53:32] SPEAKER_00: Right.
[53:33] SPEAKER_00: Now, we've covered a lot of ground.
[53:35] SPEAKER_00: And,
[53:36] SPEAKER_00: you know,
[53:36] SPEAKER_00: I think,
[53:37] SPEAKER_00: you know,
[53:38] this is such an extraordinary book and that you say you
[53:41] wouldn't do another
[53:42] SPEAKER_00: biography.
[53:42] SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
[53:43] SPEAKER_00: This is
[53:44] SPEAKER_00: This is a math thesis.
[53:46] SPEAKER_00: It's a tome.
[53:47] SPEAKER_00: It's a big book.
[53:48] SPEAKER_00: It's a big book.
[53:50] SPEAKER_00: It's a big book, almost 600 pages.
[53:53] SPEAKER_03: It's got a different cover in the UK.
[53:55] SPEAKER_03: It's perhaps the other way around.
[53:58] SPEAKER_03: I can't tell if you can read it.
[54:00] SPEAKER_03: This is the UK version.
[54:02] SPEAKER_03: So the UK version also has lovely endpapers.
[54:06] SPEAKER_03: Oh, right.
[54:07] So this is the blackboard that Crick and Brenner wrote on,
[54:13] which is a photo of.
[54:15] SPEAKER_03: The text is absolutely identical.
[54:18] SPEAKER_03: This is just a bit fancy.
[54:19] SPEAKER_03: The guy here looks more like a madman, you know.
[54:23] SPEAKER_03: Yeah, well, that's taken at the sulk.
[54:27] SPEAKER_03: As you know, covers and publishers, they do what they want.
[54:31] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
[54:32] SPEAKER_00: I had nothing to do with either version.
[54:35] SPEAKER_00: Okay, so in closing, did we miss anything?
[54:38] I mean,
[54:38] you couldn't cover,
[54:39] in an hour's discussion,
[54:41] we couldn't cover this incredible work.
[54:43] SPEAKER_03: No, I think you did.
[54:45] SPEAKER_03: I think the only thing I'd add is that...
[54:49] SPEAKER_03: Although he did do these things,
[54:51] the other thread that runs through the book is he always had
[54:54] somebody else.
[54:56] SPEAKER_03: He had to have another researcher,
[54:58] SPEAKER_03: whether it was Sidney Brenner,
[55:00] SPEAKER_03: Jim Watson,
[55:01] SPEAKER_03: Christophe Koch,
[55:03] SPEAKER_03: Peter Lawrence,
[55:04] SPEAKER_03: every stage...
[55:05] They were mainly men,
[55:07] mainly young,
[55:08] always younger than him,
[55:09] mainly from different countries.
[55:11] SPEAKER_03: So there was kind of like something else.
[55:13] SPEAKER_03: You know, if he could just talk to himself, that would have been useless.
[55:16] He needed somebody else who he could argue with in this very
[55:20] confrontational but friendly style.
[55:21] You had to be able to say whatever you thought and come up with
[55:24] crazy ideas and the
[55:26] person you're talking to could shoot them down or you could
[55:28] then develop them.
[55:29] SPEAKER_03: Brenner called these mad sessions that they had.
[55:33] SPEAKER_03: And that is...
[55:35] SPEAKER_03: You know, he had time to think.
[55:37] SPEAKER_03: When asked what he did, he said, I read and I think.
[55:41] SPEAKER_03: Most academics don't have that, right?
[55:43] SPEAKER_03: You know,
[55:43] he was privileged to have a research-only job and working in a
[55:49] field where he could
[55:50] SPEAKER_03: just think and come up with ideas,
[55:52] SPEAKER_03: partly because he was clever,
[55:53] SPEAKER_03: partly because of the areas he was working in.
[55:55] He didn't have to ask for money,
[55:57] as I said,
[55:57] just one big grant in his whole life.
[56:00] SPEAKER_03: And, you know...
[56:02] SPEAKER_03: So in a way, he was living in an idyllic age.
[56:06] SPEAKER_03: For most scientists today wouldn't recognize that.
[56:08] SPEAKER_03: It would be impossible.
[56:10] SPEAKER_03: He never graded a paper.
[56:12] SPEAKER_03: He never did any of the...
[56:13] SPEAKER_03: Apart from the year or so that he actually ran the South,
[56:16] SPEAKER_03: which was a disaster,
[56:17] SPEAKER_03: and then it killed him,
[56:19] SPEAKER_03: he had nothing to do with administration.
[56:20] SPEAKER_03: Whenever he was asked, he'd say...
[56:22] SPEAKER_03: I know nothing about it and I'm very poor at it.
[56:25] SPEAKER_03: So I think that the main thing is his collaborative work.
[56:30] SPEAKER_03: None of his discoveries came simply from him.
[56:32] SPEAKER_03: It was from this interaction with somebody else that he could really,
[56:35] SPEAKER_03: and he developed that with somebody we haven't mentioned,
[56:38] SPEAKER_03: a very strange bloke called George Kreisel,
[56:41] SPEAKER_03: who was a mathematician who he met during the war.
[56:45] SPEAKER_03: And Kreisel was a philosopher and a logist.
[56:49] SPEAKER_03: as well as a mathematician.
[56:50] He knew Wittgenstein,
[56:51] introduced Crick to Wittgenstein,
[56:53] all sorts of things.
[56:54] SPEAKER_03: And he taught Crick how to think.
[56:55] He made Crick think in this very precise way and ask questions
[57:00] and challenge ideas
[57:02] SPEAKER_03: in these very intense interactions that he had with his colleagues.
[57:07] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[57:07] SPEAKER_00: I mean, I found that his antibodies to dogma and
[57:13] SPEAKER_00: of course, is central dogma.
[57:15] That is something that in the spirit of science,
[57:17] we can't get enough of just not to accept
[57:21] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
[57:22] SPEAKER_00: Hatbox hemoglobin story and all these other things that weren't right.
[57:26] And,
[57:27] you know,
[57:27] he was never,
[57:28] and it's interesting you bring out that he had a foil.
[57:31] He had someone else that he would always with to be able to
[57:35] really attack the dogma
[57:37] SPEAKER_00: and to get it right.
[57:38] SPEAKER_00: So anyway, Matthew, this has been exhilarating.
[57:41] SPEAKER_00: I've so enjoyed the conversation and I've so enjoyed this book.
[57:45] SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much.
[57:48] And I hope everybody who has any interest in life science gets
[57:53] a chance to read it
[57:54] SPEAKER_00: because they're going to learn a lot about historic discoveries,
[57:59] SPEAKER_00: not just in the life science of DNA and life itself,
[58:04] SPEAKER_00: but also in our brain,
[58:06] SPEAKER_00: in our mind,
[58:07] SPEAKER_00: in the neuroscience world.
[58:09] SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
[58:09] SPEAKER_00: I've really enjoyed it.
[58:11] SPEAKER_03: Well, thanks, Eric.
[58:12] SPEAKER_03: It's been a fantastic experience.
[58:13] I hope everybody who's watching now live and later on finds it
[58:18] interesting and is
[58:19] inspired to go and look at the book in your library or even to
[58:22] buy a copy or to
[58:23] SPEAKER_03: listen to a copy because it's a good audio book too.
[58:26] SPEAKER_03: And this has been a really good conversation.
[58:28] SPEAKER_03: It's been fantastic.
[58:29] SPEAKER_00: And we're going to look forward to your next book on Heredity in...
[58:34] SPEAKER_03: About three years.
[58:35] SPEAKER_03: Another three years.
[58:37] SPEAKER_01: Okay.
[58:37] SPEAKER_01: Well, keep up the great work.
[58:39] SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much, man.
[58:39] SPEAKER_01: All right.
[58:40] SPEAKER_01: Bye-bye.
[58:41] SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
[58:41] SPEAKER_01: Bye-bye.

Shows are listed from Apple Podcasts' charts and directory, and Podcast Index where it is used. Every show and episode belongs to its publisher and plays from the publisher's own feed; this site hosts none of them.