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Who is Francis Crick?
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This conversation delves into the life and legacy of Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the DNA structure. Dr. Matthew Cobb, the guest, explores Crick's multifaceted personality, his poetic inspirations, collaborative nature, and his later pursuits in consciousness. The discussion also touches on the controversies surrounding his work, particularly regarding the contributions of Rosalind Franklin, and reflects on Crick's complex character, blending modern scientific thought with outdated socio-political ideas.
Takeaways
- Crick's story is often simplified to his DNA discovery.
- He had a deep appreciation for poetry and its connection to science.
- Collaboration was a key aspect of Crick's success.
- His early life was marked by average academic performance.
- Crick's transition to biology was driven by a desire to understand life.
- The discovery of DNA was a complex, collaborative effort.
- Controversies exist regarding the ethics of scientific discovery.
- Crick's later work focused on the nature of consciousness.
- He had a unique blend of intuition and logical thinking.
- Crick's outdated socio-political views contrast with his scientific modernity.
Chapters
- 00:00 The Legacy of Francis Crick
- 01:13 Introduction to Matthew Cobb and His Book
- 03:43 The Influence of Francis Crick
- 06:19 Crick's Unique Approach to Science
- 07:19 Crick's Early Life and Self-Perception
- 10:04 The Impact of Naval Service on Crick
- 12:34 Crick's Transition to Biology
- 15:06 The Role of Schrodinger's Work
- 17:26 The Dynamic Between Watson and Crick
- 20:13 The Discovery of the Double Helix
- 23:02 The Controversy of Rosalind Franklin's Contribution
- 28:23 The Diplomatic Row and Pauling's Mistake
- 29:38 The Discovery of DNA's Structure
- 34:31 Crick and Brenner's Collaboration
- 38:41 Crick's Exploration of Consciousness
- 43:03 Crick's Complex Legacy
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Transcript
Introduction: Science as Poetry
00:00:00
Speaker
Today's episode begins not with discovery, but with a poem. 1959, Francis Crick, one of the minds behind DNA's double helix, is standing on the California coast reading peyote poem by beat poet Michael McClure.
00:00:18
Speaker
The words full of cosmic unity and vivid hallucination strike something deep in him. Crick, a scientist who rejected religion but never stopped seeking meaning, pins that poem to the wall of his Cambridge home.
00:00:33
Speaker
For him, science was poetry, a way of finding structure and beauty in the chaos of the world. Welcome back to Breaking Math. I'm your host, Autumn Finaf, and today it's the show where we explore the ideas that shape our understanding of our world, from equations to consciousness, and from chaos to code.
00:00:55
Speaker
Our guest today, Matthew Cobb, has written about the side of Crick not just as a but the seeker. We'll talk about curiosity, creativity, collaboration, and how the search for life's blueprint led Crick to chase the mystery behind the mind itself.
Chronicling Francis Crick: Motivation and Impact
00:01:13
Speaker
Now, what inspired you to write Crick, A Mind in Motion? Well, I'd written two other books which unintentionally had ended up being all about him. So in 2015, I published a book called Life's Greatest Secrets, which was all about the race to crack the genetic code after the DNA double helix had been ah discovered, the implications of that, what happened over the next kind of 10, 15 years. And that turned out to be all about Crick, which in fact, I should have known it was going to be, but
00:01:46
Speaker
I obviously hadn't done my research properly enough before I started writing. But, you know, this character, his brilliance, his insight just kind of blew me away. And then in 2020, I published a book called The Idea of the Brain. And that was a history of our ideas about what the brain is and how it works and so on.
00:02:05
Speaker
And in 1977, Crickard moved to California. He'd left Cambridge, UK, got to California, worked the Salk Institute. And he'd gone to... study consciousness.
00:02:17
Speaker
And i knew i knew he'd done this because I was ah an undergraduate as a student in psychology, in fact, when when this happened. And so, you know, everybody laughed, ho, ho, ho. Crick's going to crack consciousness. And spoiler, he didn't. Nobody nobody has yet.
00:02:29
Speaker
But, so I knew that he hadn't made any single great breakthrough. But to my great surprise when I was writing this book about the, really, in a way, the history of neuroscience, is that in the section, the the half of the book that deals with the the modern era, he kept on muscling his way into the front of every chapter. And I had no idea that, although he hadn't made any great breakthrough, his influence had been remarkable. And I then started thinking, well, how can you do that? How is it possible? You know, i mean, being really smart in one area, I get that.
00:03:01
Speaker
But really, really smart and influential in two areas. How is that possible? How can somebody fit all that in their head? And so I decided I'd write a biography, which I've never written. And I thought, that I mean, there are two biographies that are on the market already, or they've been around for a while, since shortly after he died in 2005. I wanted to write something that was neither an academic biography, which is what one of them is, nor a quite a short and snappy version for the the general public. i want to write something in between. want to really get to grips with the man and his ideas and his his life in in other
Poetic Influences and Intuitive Science
00:03:37
Speaker
respects as well.
00:03:37
Speaker
Now, you start the story as a poem and not a molecule. Yeah, that's right. Why do you think the moment captures the essence of who he was? Well, yeah, the book begins rather strangely for most readers, which is the point.
00:03:52
Speaker
ah It starts with ah Crick in San Francisco in 1958. So this is five years after he's co-discovered the structure that of DNA. where he's He's a famous monk scientist, but he's not known to the general public particularly.
00:04:06
Speaker
And he goes to he's working San Francisco and he goes to City Lights Bookstore, ah which was the kind of the beating heart of the beat poet movement.
00:04:17
Speaker
And he goes down into the basement and he finds this long poem printed on a long sheet. And it's called Peyote Poem. And it's by a man called Michael McClure, who at the time was not particularly well known. And this poem describes the effects, well, it's a psychedelic trip of it's the effects of eating the peyote, the cactus buds that that McClure ingested.
00:04:39
Speaker
And it's very it's very vivid. It's very emotional. It's very kind of muscular. It's all in capitals. There are live... horizontal lines all over it. um Crick was really, really taken with it. He's always been interested in poetry, this was something way off. This wasn't T.S. Eliot or W.B. Yeats. This was really kind of something ah else. And I thought he not only bought the poem, he pinned it up on the in the hall at home. And there was one particular stanza that he was very taken with, which...
00:05:09
Speaker
in which McClure is describing the kind of, you know, the effects of this drug on his brain. And he says, this is the powerful knowledge, in capital letters, italic, underscored. And Crick thought this was marvellous, and he used it as an epigraph later on to a chapter in a book he wrote.
00:05:27
Speaker
And so it was really important to him. And I knew that he went on to become friends with McClure. And I thought this will wrong foot everybody because everybody expects either going to start with a double helix or you're going to start with winning a Nobel Prize in 1962 or something like that. Whereas I wanted to say something else about Crick apart from simply talking about his science.
00:05:49
Speaker
And in fact, By understanding what he liked in the poetry, it also gives you an insight into his more intuitive approach to to to doing science. It wasn't simply a matter of kind of, you know, adding up the numbers in a spreadsheet and saying, oh, that's the answer.
00:06:04
Speaker
He would make intuitive leaps and this more emotional and subjective side to his thinking I thought was really interesting and wasn't what I expected to find when I started writing the book. And I don't think most readers would expect the book to begin that way. He did he did later ah experiment with LSD and maybe with mescaline, which is the active ingredient of peyote.
00:06:27
Speaker
It's not quite clear, but he clearly, at the time, he hadn't. He didn't know what peyote was. He'd have known about mescaline because he would have read Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, which came out in 1952.
00:06:39
Speaker
But ah he wasn't, you know, mean, this wasn't something that he recognised. think that's why he found it so exciting, that it was completely kind of orthogonal to his everyday experience. Or in the the mysticism, the the kind of Celtic mysticism of W. Yeats, the Anglican mysticism of T.S. Eliot, or the ah Catholic myst mysticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins, all of whom were poets whom he greatly admired life.
00:07:06
Speaker
But he found their religious beliefs rather frustrating, whereas this was something completely different. This was something that was rooted, and because McClure was like cricket materialist, it was rooted in biology and science, but it was also quite weird and quite exciting. So later on when he did indulge in various ah mind-bending drugs, he he kind of recognised the accuracy of what McClure had written about.
00:07:32
Speaker
Now, Crick once called himself averagely bright. Do you think that humility was sincere part of how he framed intelligence itself?
00:07:43
Speaker
This can start at an early age for self-perception. Yeah, I think that's actually, that's a very interesting point. I mean, I think he it was true. I mean, one of the things, you know, biographies you start on the Bourne is born in Northampton on 8th of June And then you try and see what's going to happen in the future. don't know, somebody like Mozart, I don't by the time he was five, he was entertaining the emperor and composing symphonies and stuff like that.
00:08:12
Speaker
So clearly he was marked out from the beginning. But Crick wasn't like that. He was just, he was, I think, you know, it's it's true. but He said he was averagely bright. He did okay at school. He was known for being kind of curious and asking lots of questions, but, that's what children do.
00:08:27
Speaker
So I think that's I don't think that's he i only he was being modest. I think he was being quite accurate that he was smartish, but there was nothing special about him. And indeed, right up until then, so he he goes to university, does a degree in physics and maths at University College London, where he gets not the top mark, which will be a first class degree. He gets what's called a 2.1, which is still good.
00:08:49
Speaker
But it's not somebody who's blown everybody away and has, you know, aced all his exams and all the rest of It's somebody who's smart, but nothing special to write home about. He starts a PhD on what he describes the most boring subject in the world, which is how water changes its viscosity under pressure.
00:09:07
Speaker
And then the water breaks out and he gets conscripted into the army or the Navy scientific service. And that's when he begins to change. That's when you can see something happening to him and he starts to think in a rather different way. So i think as a child, he was averagely bright.
00:09:26
Speaker
As a man, i think he was unbelievably smart in some respects. what Not in everyone. as in in the In the 1960s, somebody ah scrawled on a, chalked on a wall in in Cambridge, England, a brick for God.
00:09:40
Speaker
And he wasn't God. I mean, he was very very clever, but there were distinct limits, and we'll maybe talk about these later on, to his understanding of things and his grasp of things, which in fact was quite nice to discover.
00:09:52
Speaker
So there were moments when I could think, hey, Francis, you really don't get this. And then that you ask the question, why is that? How can you be so smart in some areas? And so just really don't get it in others. I think the term is coined genius
Crick's Scientific Evolution: WWII to Biophysics
00:10:07
Speaker
zones.
00:10:07
Speaker
Everyone has their own genius zone. But if you... That's nice. Yeah. So if you teach a fish to... walk outside of water you you're not going to have the same result as telling them to swim so everyone has their own exact intricacies for brilliance right but you also mentioned that he worked in the navy and if i remember correctly it was naval mines during world war two yeah how did that shape his collaborative instincts later on Well, it wasn't so much the work he was doing, which was ah kind of intricate. was designing circuits to, and they i mean, they were kind of in an arms race, literally and metaphorically, with the German Navy. So the point about a mine is that you want it to be able to explode if it comes into contact or close to an enemy ship, but you also want to be able to defuse it
00:10:59
Speaker
if it's ah if it's one of your ships that it's close to. And so you had to develop circuits that would enable this to to happen. And every time the Germans captured one of these mines, they would change their approach to enable them to be able to disarm it. So there was this very rapid turnaround. You know, they discover that their old techniques didn't work, and so they then had to develop new circuits.
00:11:21
Speaker
The key point was not so much the work he was doing, but he met a mathematician, a very odd mathematician, who went on to play a... Really important in his part in Crick's life, a man called George Kreisel, who was not only a mathematician, he was a logician, got his degree from Cambridge in in two years.
00:11:39
Speaker
ah Normally it would be three. So he was very, very smart. And he worked... um He worked with Wittgenstein, the philosopher and philosopher of logic, and argued with him. And Crick learnt from Kreisel, because he's a kind of a mixture between a mathematician and a philosopher, which is infuriating, right? Because these are people who will ask really, really precise questions and make you think about what you're thinking about. They won't just take any old flim-flam.
00:12:05
Speaker
They may not know what you're talking about, but they they've got ways of making you think more clearly. And he always argued that that was what changed his mind, literally, that he said something like, you know before I met Kreisel, I was a very woolly thinker and, ah you know, full of kind of jokey aphorisms, a bit like kind of obstacle... Oscar Wilde kind of thing.
00:12:26
Speaker
And now he met this man with this absolute insistence on rigour, logic, precision. And that helped Crick do two things. Firstly, change his way of thinking. Secondly, as you suggest, their interactions became model-wise.
00:12:42
Speaker
for what characterised Crick for the the rest of his life. That is, he was always... He never worked on his own. He was always working with somebody else, somebody else with whom he could argue, debate, struggle to try and find the answer.
00:12:56
Speaker
And that became his way of working right until the day died. Now, he was always collaborating with someone. When he was becoming a biologist at Strange ways Crick was surrounded by living cells and he quickly learned that they didn't obey his rules in physics.
00:13:12
Speaker
Yeah. what did that What did that experience teach him about complexity? And who was he working with at the time? Yeah. So he, Crick was a, after the end of the war, he worked briefly in naval intelligence. We don't know what he did there, but he there are various documents in his archives stamped top secret in which he he was kind of making politics about trying to reorganize the intelligence services.
00:13:37
Speaker
But in the end, he decided that that wasn't what he wanted to do. And he wanted to go back to science. And 1947, He wrote a little document, which is really quite remarkable, in which he sets out um what he wants to do in life. And he says, I want to solve two things.
00:13:52
Speaker
I want to understand what life is, and I want to understand how the brain works, what consciousness is. And both these things have got, have had in the past, and to a extent still do, mystical explanations. People will reach for some kind of ah mystical or divine explanation for what's going on. And Crick wanted to...
00:14:12
Speaker
root both these mysterious and astonishing things in material science, in actual, in material reality. Amazingly, he did, in fact, go on to do both those things.
00:14:23
Speaker
So the first thing he decided he wanted to do was to, ah he needed to get training, as you you said, in biology, because training in physics know anything about biology. And this is, really is biology. And he gets a grant from the, basically just a training grant from from the British Medical Research Council, and he goes and works at a place called the Strange Ways, which is an institution just outside Cambridge.
00:14:46
Speaker
And he's working on motility in cells. They're trying to understand how ah cells move and their internal structure. And it's not very exciting, but it's very hard. He said later on that, you know, it required a lot of green fingers because he was growing these single cells in cell culture.
00:15:03
Speaker
And as anybody who's ever done any biology knows, it's really difficult to keep your the things you're studying alive, if you whether you know they're ants or flies or plants or single cells, they need care and attention and so on.
00:15:16
Speaker
And he probably wasn't very good at that. Indeed, he generally wasn't a very good experimentalist. That was not his forte. So this is 1947, and then he learns... that through his friend Kreisel, who's a bit like Zelig, that film in which this character keeps on popping up. Kreisel's like this.
00:15:33
Speaker
At all these key points in his life, he he actually knows people or he introduces Crick to people or or whatever. But Kreisel mentioned Crick to a man called Max Perutz, who was an Austrian refugee ah who had set up a Medical Research Council unit into biophysics, which is using the techniques of physics to study biology. And this was a big thing after the war, partly because lots of physicists had fallen out of love with physics because of the bomb.
00:16:04
Speaker
So this science that they had loved had now produced this terrible destruction. And so there was a big move out of physics into biology with these very clever physicists wanting to use these techniques to understand how how life worked and Crick decided okay that's really what I want to do this business with the cell culture that's not really my thing I want to go to the MRC biophysics unit which was in the department of physics in in cambridge in the cavendish laboratory and use what's called x-ray crystallography which is a technique of bombarding crystals with x-rays and you get these amazingly complicated patterns then you've got to do some really complicated maths and thinking and bit of chemistry to try and work out what the underlying structure is so this is basically his second research career
00:16:53
Speaker
At this stage, he's, what, 33, 34, and he's already abandoned one PhD. And now in his mid-30s, he's starting another one and new career. And really, that's kind of the ground zero for the crick we know now, because he's now using these techniques. He's got this method, this very intense way of arguing and discussing, ah which he's acquired from Chrysler. And he's in Cambridge at this laboratory run by Max Perutz. Now, at some point, he discovered Schrodinger's What Is Life. What did that unlock for him that physics alone could?
00:17:26
Speaker
So, Schrodinger was a Nobel Prize winning physicist who had fled the Nazis in Austria in when they invaded Austria in 1938 and had ended up in Ireland at the Institute of of Advanced Studies in Dublin.
00:17:42
Speaker
And part of his job was was to give a lecture to the public because he's got this prestigious, this fancy post. And being a physicist, he thought, OK, let's do something easy. oh I'll tell them what life is, right? Because that's obvious. you know I mean, I'm i'm i'm a physicist. i I can work this out.
00:17:59
Speaker
um And so he he read lots of books and articles from the ideas from the 1930s about how life worked, about the nature of genes and so on And he gave ah what was supposed to be one lecture, but turned into three.
00:18:12
Speaker
And this little book of lectures was published in 1944. And it was devoured by many, many people, including Francis Crick, Jim Watson, Morris Wilkins, who we'll talk about in a little while, who's ended up working on DNA, who had been on the Manhattan Project and was one of those physicists who had really, really...
00:18:31
Speaker
fallen out of love with physics because of what he'd been working on. And now here we've got Schrodinger saying, look, we can use the techniques of physics to try and understand, say, the nature of the gene. And this was immensely appealing, obviously, to the physicists because they thought, OK, we can use these this stuff we understand to understand this really, really complicated thing.
00:18:51
Speaker
And what Schrödinger held out was the idea that maybe it wasn't going to be so complicated after all, and you could resolve these
Collaborations and Controversies in DNA Discovery
00:18:59
Speaker
issues. So Crick found that intensely exciting. The other thing that really excited was a little article read by Linus Pauling, who was a chemist, who talked about X-ray crystallography, which was really a big thing in in in the UK at the time. And ah with the work of J.D. Bonal ah in particular, and and Dorothy Hodgkin,
00:19:19
Speaker
ah who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in 1964. And Crick decided, oh, these these two sources of information, of ideas, Schrodinger's book and a little article by Linus Pauling, they convinced him that this is where he wanted to go. And that was the kind of switch, because these tools, you thought, would be able to understand, say, molecular structure, the molecular structure of biological molecules, and perhaps that would give you eventually an understanding into how a cell worked.
00:19:47
Speaker
Now, then he met somebody that would change his life, right? Jim Watson. Brush, young, impatient, and he's exactly the opposite of Crick. Together, they would decode life itself. Now, what was this dynamic between Watson and Crick like in those early days? Yeah, so, i mean, you've got to remember that none of this happened the way we imagined it did.
00:20:12
Speaker
Crick is there in in Cambridge studying the structure of proteins. That's what he'd been, that his PhD. He's got to finish his PhD. He's only got a certain number of years to do He's got to finish it in 1953.
00:20:24
Speaker
And really what he's supposed to do is being studying the structure of proteins using X-ray crystallography. Jim Watson was, as you say, this absolutely astonishingly young astonishing man. he he went to He went to Chicago University age 15 and he had his PhD by the age of 21.
00:20:42
Speaker
So and incredibly bright, very ambitious, a bit odd as well. And he, in various convoluted ways, decided that he wanted to use X-ray crystallography to try and understand the structure of the gene.
00:20:57
Speaker
But the route he was going to do that was by studying viruses, because viruses could be thought of as basically just a gene. And he wanted to understand the structure of viruses. So he was able to wangle his way to the um to the the Cavendish in ah autumn of 1951. And he and Watson, he and Crick, Watson and Crick, hit it off virtually straight away, partly because they they're both very different in some respects, their personalities.
00:21:27
Speaker
But in terms of their... approach and their fascination, their conviction that, in fact, quite complicated problems could be solved using these techniques.
00:21:37
Speaker
That was, that's what united them. Now, it must be said, Watson knew nothing of this. He knew nothing about X-ray crystallography. and yeah I mean, he trained as a, he was going to be a bird watcher. He had a zoology degree. And I mean, Crick described him to his friends when he explained their work after the discovery of the double helix that he's a zoologist. So he's not somebody who like, he's not somebody who's like Crick is trained in physics or Wilkins had had the same background. He's somebody who's come from a very different angle. and So this was very hard for him because it's very mathsy, it's very physicsy, it's a difficult technique.
00:22:11
Speaker
But they liked chatting about things. And Crick, like nothing else, as his his boss put it, he likes finishing other people's crosswords. So if somebody's got a problem, you know, if you talk to Francis about it, he'll solve it. He'll work it out because he's got this kind of mind he likes kind of, you know, a bit of a bit like a magpie or a jackdaw. He's going to always looking for something new and shiny and and find something else. And that led to the whole hoo-ha about ah DNA and led to the many misunderstandings that still circulate on the internet today about what exactly happened.
00:22:45
Speaker
But I think the clear thing we need to understand is neither of them were supposed to be studying the structure of DNA. That was not their job. It wasn't what Crick was studying and it wasn't... Watson just didn't have the tools to be able to do it, even if he'd wanted to, but he was supposed to be working on his viruses. So this was not their job. This was not their problem.
00:23:02
Speaker
So at some point, apparently they stole data. Watson and Crick. The story of Rosalind Franklin's Photo 51 has become a flashpoint discussion in the ethics of science.
00:23:15
Speaker
How do you approach this controversy today? Well, I approach it like a historian and a scientist. So what actually happened and how do we know? So yeah, this everybody thinks, everybody knows, they don't think they know that Watson and Crick stole Rosalind Franklin's data and ah that gave them the double helix. It's an internet joke. What did Watson and Crick discover in 1953? Rosalind Franklin's data.
00:23:41
Speaker
So it's quite a good joke. But You need to ask yourself, well, how do I know this? Where's this story come from? And secondly, if Watson and Crick stole her data, how were they able to see something where, you know, Crick was very clever. Watson knew nothing about this technique. How could they see something that this very experienced X-ray crystallographer, Rosalind Franklin, could not see?
00:24:04
Speaker
So the story, in fact, is a bit odd. And when you actually dig into it, it kind of all evaporates and disintegrates ah in in your in your hands. The only reason people talk about photograph 51, this very famous photograph showing the X of the structure of DNA in an X-ray crystallographic image. is that Franklin published that. a Watson and Crick published The Structure of DNA. There were three papers published together in Nature magazine, one after the other, and they were bund their bundled together as ah as a whole bound set because they were all complementary. One was from Watson and Crick, which just described the structure with no evidence whatsoever. Then there was an article by Maurice Wilkins, who was the head of ah another um m MRC biophysics unit, which was was the deputy head, another m MRC biophysics unit, which was in King's College, London.
00:24:54
Speaker
And the third article was from his colleague, Rosalind Franklin, who was a postdoctoral researcher who'd come with a grant and And they had, the people at King's had suggested to her she might want to study DNA. It wasn't her idea at all. And unfortunately, for all sorts of reasons, Wilkins and Franklin did not get on. They were completely and utterly different. Not in the way that Watson and Crick were, but in a bad way. So crick Franklin was very vivacious.
00:25:22
Speaker
She loved to argue. She came from intellectual Jewish family where you'd argue about all sorts of things. She spent whole time in two or three years in Paris where she'd learned X-ray crystallography. She loved that because the French will argue about anything.
00:25:33
Speaker
And so this was her very outgoing, vivacious way of discussing things, of playing devil's advocate if somebody had a position, to try and find the weakness in it. So, you know, a bit Crick-esque in some ways.
00:25:46
Speaker
Whereas poor old Maurice Wilkins was really shy, retiring. He hated debate. He hated argument confrontation. He'd turn away from you when you were talking. So these two people were like chalk and cheese.
00:25:58
Speaker
Furthermore, Wilkins thought that Franklin was there to help him. Franklin had been told the problem of DNA structure would be hers alone. So this was the head of the lab had done something very, very bad and caused confusion. And it was never sorted out.
00:26:13
Speaker
It was... Yeah, so they couldn't resolve. If they'd been able to work together, so that shows you why science is about people. If Franklin and Wilkins could have worked together, then we'd we wouldn't be talking about Watson and Crick. I wouldn't have written this book because Crick would be an unknown person or a very minor figure. Unfortunately, they couldn't. So, you know, they were the problem was split up. It's like keeping, you know warring children apart. you know they were separated.
00:26:36
Speaker
They don't have anything to do with each other. Part of the problem was that the man I mentioned earlier, Pauling, He got interested in DNA and he was a really, really smart bloke. He was an American chemist.
00:26:50
Speaker
And he, in the winter of 1952, by which time Franklin has decided, I hate this place. I hate Wilkins. I can't stand any of them. I'm moving. I'm going to take in my money because it was her money, her money to go and work in another laboratory in London.
00:27:05
Speaker
She was going to have to leave the DNA problem behind because it wasn't hers. It was the labs. In 1950, end 1952, Alice Pauling, and' paulling submits a manuscript or writes a manuscript about the structure of DNA, which is completely wrong.
00:27:19
Speaker
Watson and Crick know it's wrong because it was a triple helix, kind of inside out, virtually identical to one that they'd come up with when they'd briefly toyed with the idea ah two years earlier, in which Franklin had taken one look at and laughed at and said, that's that's just wrong. It's just complete nonsense.
00:27:35
Speaker
So this meant that although Watson and Crick had been told not to work on DNA by Sir Lawrence Bragg, the head of the MRC unit in Cambridge because he was fed up with these people causing him problems because their initial attempt in December 1951 caused a huge row with the people in London saying, what are you doing?
00:27:53
Speaker
This is our molecule. Why are you fiddling around with it Plus you're wrong, you know, and you're stupidly wrong. and Scientists are so dramatic. People do not realise this. That's right. I mean, it's, you know, but it's very important. is So it's an inter-laboratory, inter-university row.
00:28:09
Speaker
And, you know, Bragg didn't care... He couldn't stand crit because he hated his voice and he was, I say, always finishing somebody else's crosswords. He annoyed Bragg intensely.
00:28:20
Speaker
Watson, he barely knew, barely knew of his existence. And these two nobodies were calling and causing this diplomatic row. So basically he said, look, get on and do what you're supposed to be doing, which is more or less what happened throughout 1952.
00:28:33
Speaker
And then, when they hear that Pauling has made this really bad mistake, bizarrely, this leads Bragg to say, OK, you can do that. And this is because Pauling had scooped Bragg and the Cambridge people over a really boring structural thing. It doesn't matter what it is. About a year earlier, so Bragg had a beef with Pauling. And now...
00:28:54
Speaker
If Pauling had made, this is Watson convinces him, Watson goes and says, look, Pauling's made this mistake. He's going to realise it's a mistake. We've got a window, a short period of time in which we can crack it, me and Crick, you know, just leave us alone for a month or so. We'll crack it.
00:29:07
Speaker
And basically that's what happens. And the story of Photograph 51, we're going to get there. There you Watson goes down mid-January to London, to King's, to show Wilkins and Franklin this manuscript to say, hey, look, paul Pauling's on our tracks, or he's on your tracks more to the point.
00:29:25
Speaker
And ah at some point, Watson sees an image of DNA, a very clear image of the DNA molecule. Now, people say this is photograph 51. But if you actually read Watson's account, he doesn't say that at all. He says he's Morris shows me some images and Morris, he says, had been repeating some of Franklin's experiments. So though Franklin did make this very good image, she literally after studying it briefly, she put it in the drawer because it wasn't the part, the issue that she was interested in. All this is explained in the in the book. It's too complicated to go in now.
00:29:57
Speaker
um So she actually looked at it thought, yeah, OK, so DNA is some kind of helical structure. That's not the kind of DNA I'm interested in. I'm interested in the crystalline form, which is much more complicated, puts it but it away, doesn't study it.
00:30:11
Speaker
Now, people have put two and two together and made 17 million here and said, aha, Watson stole this photograph 51 from Franklin. There's no evidence that he actually saw it.
00:30:22
Speaker
Furthermore, Crick never saw it. And the information that it contains was no different from a little sketch that Wilkins had sent to Crick about eight months earlier in a letter in which he sketched out a result that he'd had. His photo wasn't quite as pretty, but it was basically contained the same information.
00:30:39
Speaker
So none of the story makes sense. What is true is that Watson and Crick asked Wilkins, they said, is it OK if we start trying to solve this? And Wilkins was a bit of a dope, sort of said, a bit like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. He said, oh, well, all right then, OK, if you really want to.
00:30:56
Speaker
He didn't say, look, I need to go and talk to Bragg, the head of the lab, you know, or we need to talk to Franklin. He just said, all right. And what they didn't do was to ask Franklin, is it OK? ah Franklin was kind of finishing up the project. he was She was, let's say, moving on to a different project, different laboratory. um And there's this little note that myself and Nathaniel Comfort, who's writing a biography of Watson, ah that we discovered in which she, via ah a friend of Crick's, who was a PhD student called Pauline Cowan, she invited Crick to come to a talk she was going to give and says, but on the other hand, it's not going to be at a very high level
00:31:33
Speaker
So you can always ask Max Perutz if you want to know more. And Max Perutz, month earlier, had been at King's and as part of an official m MRC site visit to see how things were going. this was all They all went and saw each other's work to it.
00:31:49
Speaker
improved communication. And he had a report which contained a little paragraph summary, a couple of paragraphs, from each of the main researchers. And there was data in there from Franklin.
00:31:59
Speaker
Now, Crick and Watson were given this report. Apparently, mean, the implication is that Franklin either expected it or didn't particularly care. However, even that wasn't used. When Watson and Crick, Watson describes it very briefly in the double helix, which if listeners haven't ah heard, they really should read if they haven't read it.
00:32:18
Speaker
Don't believe everything that's in it, but it really is a ah cracking read. But in the 1960s, Crick gave a load of interviews to his first biographer, man called Albee, which he describes their process. And if you read very carefully, there are articles describing the structure. It's clear as well.
00:32:34
Speaker
Basically, they spent a month fiddling about, right? They just tried to see, OK, we know what the component parts are. How do they fit together? And this wasn't with a big kind of three-dimensional model. It was all with little bits of cardboard.
00:32:48
Speaker
So they work in two-dimension. had these two-dimension bits trying to work out how many times this the the spiral might go round, well how many, how they could fit together.
00:32:59
Speaker
And eventually, well, they were getting it all wrong. Nothing worked. A guy in the office said, oh, by the way, those structures that you're using, you know they're wrong. And I went, no, he got this from the textbook. and they oh, well, he said, well that's wrong.
00:33:10
Speaker
And ironically, Watson Franklin was also using the wrong form. So they then had the right forms and they they wouldn't fit together, the kind of the runs in the ladder of DNA. And Watson describes that it's on Saturday the 28th of February, he's got these two forms like this. And then one of the bits of cardboard He turns it over.
00:33:28
Speaker
And now he sees that the bases, as they're called, can fit together. Two rungs fit. And the two groups of bases, A and T and C and G, bind together. And they form identical size lumps, molecules that can then fit between the rungs. So basically, that' that's the answer. They've got the answer.
00:33:45
Speaker
And then Crick says, look, it's got a particular what's called symmetry, particular way of organisation, which is something that Franklin had recorded and noted, but hadn't thought through the implications of.
00:33:58
Speaker
She said later she could have kicked herself for not thinking of it. So this is used as, Franklin's data is used as confirmation of the model that they've got. But the model, I mean, most molecular structures don't tell you anything, unless you really, really understand. It's just bizarre, lumpy stuff. This is different.
00:34:14
Speaker
You can explain it to a six-year-old or a ten-year-old at least. And it's immediately obvious how it copies itself and how the order of the bases... can be of any order. And so you've got effectively the space, truly and metaphorically, for a code in there, genetic code, as Crick called it.
00:34:31
Speaker
After the double helix came into frame, the discovery was never an end point. It was just the beginning. So you describe Crick's mad sessions with Sidney Brenner as loud, hilarious, and wildly productive. What made this collaboration so special?
00:34:50
Speaker
Yeah, so Sidney Brenner joins the MRC laboratory in Cambridge in 1956. And he's a young South African, trained as ah as a physician, but become became absolutely convinced that he wanted to be a molecular biologist when, as a post ah postdoc at Oxford, he came to Cambridge to kind of see the structure.
Beyond DNA: Genetic Information and Neuroscience
00:35:14
Speaker
was a bit of a pilgrimage. Everybody yeah in in spring 1953... And he takes one look at it. He says, my God, I want to work on this.
00:35:21
Speaker
And he eventually meets Crick in the USA at a meeting. They really hit it off. And he then comes to Cambridge in 1956. And for the next 20 years, they shared an office.
00:35:31
Speaker
They shared a blackboard or several blackboards, which is really important. And every morning for a couple of hours, they would just yak away. They would talk to and at each other about all sorts of stuff, anything that they could, they'd read or ideas, crazy ideas. And they'd elaborate, each would elaborate this, yeah an idea and develop its implications. And then the other one would try and shoot it down.
00:35:55
Speaker
So it's this kind of jousting intellectual that went on perpetually every day that they were in but they were in the lab together. Brenner was a much better experimentalist than Crick was, but even so they together, they, they they for example, m mRNA.
00:36:11
Speaker
ah Everybody knows about mRNA. It's this kind of intermediary between the DNA sequence and the protein sequence. it's what It turns the the the genetic message into a protein, or it helps the cell to do that.
00:36:23
Speaker
Brenner and Crick suddenly realised there was all sorts of bits of information about strange forms of RNA that people were finding in cells. And on one very famous day in April 1960, when in fact some other people were present, a group of got together in a kind of after meeting, after a conference.
00:36:39
Speaker
They were in Cambridge and they're just chatting away and then suddenly the pair of them go off on one and realise that all this information, these various disparate studies that have been floating around and nobody's really put together, they can now see that if messenger RNA is this messenger, because it wasn't called that then, if it was this intermediary, that it would then take the DNA message and like a tape on a tape recorder, they say, then put it through a structure called the ribosome, and that was where proteins would be assembled.
00:37:12
Speaker
So Crick in 1953 had come up with the idea of a genetic code. um He used it much more explicitly, or he talked about genetic information. that That's ultimately...
00:37:23
Speaker
what the whole of life was. It was all about information, whether it was embodied in a DNA molecule or in a protein, life was information. Now he could actually see a part of this information flow, that this molecule was now considered as being the carrier in the information. This is incredibly modern.
00:37:41
Speaker
And Crick and Brenner basically kind of yak at each other for about 10 minutes. And a French researcher called François Jacob, who describes this in his memoir, i quote it in the book about the pair of them, you know yabbering away in it. And poor old Jacob, his french his English isn't that good. He can barely understand.
00:37:55
Speaker
And that evening, once they've kind of come down from this high of realizing what's going on, Brenner and Jacob decide they're going to go to America, which have the right kind of equipment to be able to test this hypothesis and they start to work out experiments in there this is at one of the crick's famous parties i don't think it was quite as um loose as some of their parties but anyway it was good party and they're in one room scribbling around and crick keeps on coming in and saying oh you want to do this or what about that so that was that was you know the kind of thing that he and brenner were able to do they had a number of experiments that the
00:38:29
Speaker
theories and understanding, fundamental understanding about how cells work that came out of those mad sessions, as Brenner called them. He also goes into consciousness. What drew Crick to the problem of consciousness? And did he see it as a continuation of the same logic that he once explained in DNA?
00:38:50
Speaker
So in 1947, when he comes up with these two ideas that he wants, two things he wants to study. Life is one thing. So he he hasn't really solved it, but he's gone a long way. And secondly, was consciousness. And what bugged him about both these things was the fact that they were shrouded in mystical ideas. So that, in an attempt to root in materialist science, these very complicated biological phenomena, that was what was underlying them.
00:39:14
Speaker
Now, his turn to consciousness did not succeed. i don't think there's any way of putting it any better than that. We haven't cracked the problem. And indeed, it's getting worse. There are now 250 theories of consciousness, which shows that, in fact, the field has lost its way.
00:39:30
Speaker
You know, they're not even talking about the same thing. It's just that it's a big, big mess. But what Crick did... was to focus people's mind by saying, if we're going to try and understand this, because, he was doing this, as to say, when when i was a student, and I remember us sitting around in the coffee lounge going, well, consciousness, it's some kind of epiphenomenon. It's merging from neurons in the brain. we're never going to understand it. Who cares? Let's do something else, right?
00:39:52
Speaker
Which, you Now, Crick was a bit more incisive than that. He thought, well, that's true. But we can ask questions. We can say, what which are the neurons that are associated with consciousness? it Because not all the 80 billion neurons in your so and your brain are associated with conscious activity.
00:40:10
Speaker
Which are the neurons? Where are they? What do they do to try and understand what might be specific about them compared to other neurons which aren't involved in consciousness, but are involved in other aspects of of processing?
00:40:23
Speaker
So that framework, that materialist framework for how to study consciousness, which he began to develop over the next 20 years until his until his death,
00:40:34
Speaker
ah with a man called Christoph Koch, who, like Brenner, was much younger than him. Virtually all of Crick's partners, they were they were other. They weren't like him, right? They were generally younger than him.
00:40:45
Speaker
they were also They were often not from the same country. They weren't necessarily English. Most of them were men, once he had the most intense relationship. But he did have very close relationships and intense relationships with a number of female scientists um in in particular in his neuroscience period but also with rosalind franklin in the second half of the in the late 1950s and what crick does is to try and and this is why was he kept on popping up in my book on the brain see he he says when we can have a materialist approach to consciousness but we need to understand much more about structure about how the brain is organized about the
00:41:21
Speaker
not in broad tracts, you know got this big lump here and this big lump here, but yeah how the cells are organised. And this was quite unheard of at the time. and he But basically, he's at the origin of the whole kind of current fad, not fad fashion, not fad, movement for connectomes, that is trying to understand, organise at a cellular level, describe at a cellular level, the connectome of ah a brain. ah We haven't got anywhere near the human brain. The best we've got is the connectome of a fly brain, which...
00:41:50
Speaker
which is about 10,000 neurons. okay So the human brain is 80 billion, the mouse is about 70 billion. So we're way, way off. But this is what Crick said we needed. Absolutely right. He also made various predictions about the kind of techniques we'd be able to develop.
00:42:06
Speaker
He predicted, for example, that we'd be able to control, if by getting manipulating cells genetically, we'd be able to control neurons with with light. We'd be able to use light to control their activity.
00:42:20
Speaker
And indeed, that's exactly what happened. I mean, he wrote, he published an article on this. And within ah about six months, somebody who sent him a send somebody sent him an email saying, hey, that's exactly what we've just done.
00:42:31
Speaker
So hes he's thinking about how techniques can help us move forward. But above all, it's this materialist framework for studying consciousness, which he expressed not only in lots and lots of articles in leading journalism, in particular Nature,
00:42:47
Speaker
but also in a very successful popular book called The Astonishing Hypothesis, which he published in 1994, and which really helped ignite the public's interest in this question. So, you know, there are books on consciousness everywhere now, and it's all Crick's fault. As you were going through some of his research or finding out more information about him, I know you already have a couple of books on Crick.
00:43:11
Speaker
Was there anything really interesting or surprising that you found this time around? Well, I think firstly, the the collaborative aspect became much clearer to me. And that that was the that was the starting point of the ah book, in fact. I wanted to think about how he and Brenner were able to have this incredibly productive relationship for the 20 years. And then, as I was working on the book, I realised that, in fact, this was yeah this is an approach that he used consistently.
00:43:39
Speaker
And I thought that was very interesting because although scientists tend to work in teams, having that very intense, almost intimate relationship with somebody who you you trust because, you know, you you're going to expose yourself to ridicule by saying something stupid, right? And they're going to shoot you down.
00:43:54
Speaker
So you've got to trust them. You've like them. You don't necessarily need to be best mates, but you've got to be very open to their ideas and their way of thinking and trust that they're not going to you know, completely take the mickey. I thought that was very interesting and how, from a kind of science policy point of view, could you cultivate this? this Is this something you could teach, train people to do? So that was kind of the starting point and then discovering that it was so systematic in his way of thinking, I thought was very interesting. And then...
00:44:22
Speaker
The other thing which is connected is where we started with his interest in poetry and the intuitive side of his thinking. Because although he was logical and a scientist and all the rest of it, he was also incredibly intuitive and he would make leaps or be adventurous, as he put it.
00:44:41
Speaker
And this meant that lot of his, you he threw out ideas, he published articles, you know, theory, a theory of He published a theory of dreams in nature, which was wrong, but was very, yeah not of the content of dreams, why you dream of your Auntie Jessie as a giraffe or something, but why we dream at all, what's going on. And he would you this idea he developed in parallel to the developing ideas of computational models of behavior, which in fact led directly
00:45:11
Speaker
to today's AI models and so on. So he's he's really coming up with ideas, partly to enable them to be shot down. He expected most of his ideas to be wrong.
00:45:23
Speaker
those his you These weren't theories ah of everything, that explained everything. They would be effectively a hypothesis. One particular thing. Okay, how could we test that? Experimenters, here's my idea. Can you see if it's right or wrong? Ah, you go away and see whether this particular part of the brain is involved in it in a particular behavior or whether the particular neuronal mechanism that he predicted for dreams, does that actually occur during dream sleep and so on.
00:45:50
Speaker
So i thought that was intuitive aspect was very interesting. And it links with what he liked in or admired what he felt. in reading McClure's poetry, this very muscular... I mean, it's a kind of materialist mysticism. You can go and watch him ah reading on the internet.
00:46:09
Speaker
he went to San Diego, where the Cricks lived, and he he gave ah reading in 2000. It's on the internet. You can watch it on YouTube. And you can just see Crick at the beginning, the end, shaking his hand and so on.
00:46:20
Speaker
But McClure's kind of muscular, mystical, psychedelic experience, that struck a chord in Crick's way of viewing the world and trying to understand, you know, the perception.
00:46:34
Speaker
When you've got a set of data, you you know there's something in there, you intuit it, you can feel, but you can't necessarily make sense of it. And you You kind of try to explore it. How could I be convinced that it is this interpretation is correct? What would I need to do next?
Personal Life and Legacy
00:46:48
Speaker
And this very subjective approach, which he also found in McClure's poetry, I think was thought was very interesting. It made him not a very smart robot. I mean, he's not commander data, right? He's he's some but you know he's a human being with these very all sorts of passions. I mean, he you know he had very interesting personal life. He and his wife had no open relationship.
00:47:09
Speaker
ah which undoubtedly didn't always go well, but was quite modern in some respects. Young people might find it quite quite interesting that this person back in the in their late 40s was living a life that they might think was the best way of ah having a couple relationship.
00:47:23
Speaker
Last question. Is there anything that you want someone to take away from this book? What's the biggest thing? Well, also things very So he was... got things very wrong so he was ah an advocate of a kind of class-based eugenics, that he's thought that ah the state should encourage rich people to have more children and poor people to have fewer children. And you should perhaps tax children. Maybe that's one way of doing it. It's a very clever idea.
00:47:51
Speaker
So he has these very kind of childish Edwardian ideas from the, you know, these ideas that he probably learnt in the 90s as a young boy, which very fashionable at the time, and never really thought about he wasn't interested in politics. He didn't read the newspaper,
00:48:05
Speaker
He didn't have a TV or radio until the 1980s. So he's completely disconnected from most things that many people would think we were important. And this is, you know, he clearly just does not get it, which is quite fun because it means I can read this stuff and say, Francis, you're an idiot. Why are you saying this? You know, this is just not true.
00:48:23
Speaker
Why do you believe this? Why aren't you questioning your beliefs in the same way as you would do about other issues, about scientific issues? So I think what I want the reader to come away with is that there he's this complex character.
00:48:37
Speaker
He's got these sides of his personality which are mistaken and pretty unattractive today. But these aren't overwhelming, i don't think.
00:48:48
Speaker
his overwhelming contribution to science, both as a molecular biologist and as a ah scientist. and that's really what the book is about, trying to get inside his head. And also, therefore, how these old-fashioned ideas can co-inhabit, these old-fashioned, you know kind of socio-political ideas can co-inhabit in his head with basically the most incredible modern ideas.
00:49:10
Speaker
And it struck me that, you know, that feels odd, but it only feels odd because he's so modern that you assume he must be modern in every respect. You know, I mean, he was born in 1916, so he's as old as my father.
00:49:22
Speaker
He'd be, it many readers, he'd be as old as their grandparents or great-grandparents. And, you know, I don't suppose great-grandparents would be agree with their great-grandchildren on lots of things, you know. So...
00:49:33
Speaker
But there's, he's in a way, he's a man out of his time. He's stuck in some respects in the 1920s, in the early decades of the 20th century. But his ideas about science are influencing today and tomorrow. of Yeah, for the rest of this century, at least, will carry on shaping how we think about the natural world.
00:49:51
Speaker
Matthew, thank you so much for coming on Breaking Math. Now, Francis Crick's story is often told as a tale of one discovery, DNA. But in truth, it's a story about never stopping at the first answer, about finding beauty in structure, meaning in molecules, and poetry and patterns of the mind.
00:50:11
Speaker
Now, he once said that science was the only permanent revolution, And maybe that's what his life really proved, that curiosity itself is immortal. So as always, stay curious and stay informed.
00:50:24
Speaker
Until next time on Breaking Math.