Doing Someone Else’s Crossword

The Francis Crick of Matthew Cobb’s new biography was both the consummate insider and a scientific outlier.

By Angela N. H. CreagerMarch 6, 2026

• Science & Technology

• Biography & Autobiography

FRANCIS CRICK’S NAME is familiar for being the other half to James Watson—together the duo that elucidated the double-helical structure of DNA in 1953. That form, their double helix, became an icon of the gene, even of life itself. Over time, however, Watson and Crick’s stardom has been shadowed by their model’s dependence on unpublished data from biophysicists at King’s College London, especially Rosalind Franklin. Matthew Cobb’s new biography, Crick: A Mind in Motion, sheds fresh light on the rivalry surrounding the discovery of DNA but also fleshes out Crick’s other contributions, including his last 25 years working on neuroscience. Two other biographies—a popular one by Matt Ridley (Francis Crick: Discover of the Genetic Code, 2006) and a more scholarly one by Robert Olby (Francis Crick: Hunter of Life’s Secrets, 2008)—portray Crick the molecular biologist. Cobb expands that portrait by examining the work on visual perception and human consciousness Crick pursued after moving to California, and by emphasizing his restlessness and sociability.

Given Crick’s role in the DNA story, readers will want to know whether Cobb has anything new to say about the discovery of the double helix. The biography yields some new information while challenging current perceptions. In 1953, when Watson and Crick published their DNA model in Nature, their paper was accompanied by two others from King’s College London, whose X-ray crystallographers—Maurice Wilkins, A. R. Stokes, H. R. Wilson, Rosalind Franklin, and Raymond Gosling—had produced the best structural data of DNA to date. Watson and Crick stated in the acknowledgments of their now-classic paper that they had been “stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King’s College, London.” Watson’s 1968 tell-all The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of DNA revealed this admission to be an understatement, as he explained how and when he and Crick accessed Franklin’s data.

Wilkins and co-workers had observed that DNA crystals varied depending on the humidity. Building on this observation, Franklin identified two distinct forms of crystallized DNA and obtained superior diffraction patterns of both the drier “A” form and the more humid “B” form. Wilkins had suggested that DNA was helical; Franklin was dubious, given the complex diffraction patterns of the A form. Watson says that when Wilkins showed him Franklin and Gosling’s diffraction pattern of the B form (dubbed “Photograph 51”), he immediately perceived the evidence of a helical structure. “The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race,” Watson writes; “mere inspection of its X-ray picture gave several of the vital helical parameters.” This makes for a dramatic eureka moment in Watson’s memoir, but as Cobb shows, it is highly misleading. Indeed, Cobb asserts that Photograph 51 played “no part in the discovery of the double helix.”

Watson and Crick’s 1953 announcement was the culmination of five weeks of intensive work, focused on model-building (a method Franklin did not trust). As the two described their effort in a longer 1954 paper, it was “the classical method of trial and error.” The duo scoured the literature for evidence about DNA’s chemistry and structure, including Erwin Chargaff’s work on the ratio of bases and Linus Pauling’s calculations of interatomic distances and bond angles. Their familiarity with biological materials gave them an edge. Having studied the symmetry of the protein crystals, Crick perceived the significance of the “C2” space group of DNA—that there were two strands of nucleic acid running in opposite directions. Watson brought inside knowledge of the experiment by Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase that identified phage DNA as the hereditary material, making them alert to structures that suited this function.

Crick and Watson were also lucky to share an office with Jerry Donohue, an American chemist who had worked with Pauling. Donohue told Watson that the textbook structures of the pyrimidine and purine bases of DNA (the As, Ts, Gs, and Cs) placed some hydrogen atoms in the wrong locations. Donohue’s corrected structures enabled Watson to discover base pairing: the fact that the two strands were held together by hydrogen bonds between A with T and G with C bases. The two strands, running in opposite directions, had complementary base sequences, offering a mechanism for DNA replication. In their efforts, Cobb argues, Watson and Crick benefited from Wilkins’s data, not just Franklin’s. Moreover, thanks to their colleague Max Perutz, Watson and Crick had access to a report of the King’s College unpublished results on DNA that was assembled and circulated by the Medical Research Council (MRC), which supported the biophysicists at both King’s College and Cambridge. Franklin’s section included key parameters from the X-diffraction of DNA, including the C2 space group.

Yet Cobb argues that the perception that Watson and Crick “stole” Franklin’s data is not accurate, and that there is no evidence that she held that view herself. The longer paper published by Watson and Crick in 1954 acknowledged the data (now published) from the King’s College group more clearly than the short piece in Nature, which had left the impression that the experimental data confirmed the Watson-Crick model rather than informed it. Franklin was herself closer to determining the correct structure of DNA than Wilkins, Watson, or Crick knew. By early 1953, she had accepted that both the A form and the B form were helical, but she did not perceive the structural clue of the C2 space group. When Watson and Crick cracked the DNA structure, she was also on the verge of leaving King’s College for J. D. Bernal’s laboratory at Birkbeck College, where she would study the molecular structures of plant viruses. When she died from cancer only five years later, she was acclaimed for her work on viruses, the significance of her work on DNA underappreciated.

While studying viruses, Franklin interacted much more with Watson and Crick than she did during the “race” to the double helix. While at Cambridge, Watson learned to use X-ray diffraction in his study of the structure of tobacco mosaic virus (TMV)—which he showed was helical. At Birkbeck, the exquisite diffraction patterns Franklin obtained of TMV led her to propose a detailed structural model of the virus particle, confirming that the protein subunits formed a helix. She circulated a draft of this model to colleagues, including Watson and Crick, before publishing it in 1955. The following year, Watson and Crick published a theoretical paper on virus structure, which deserves more space than Cobb gives it. At a personal level, as he notes, Franklin became friends with both Crick and his wife Odile, choosing to recover at their home after one of her cancer surgeries. As I have argued elsewhere, this would be difficult to understand if she felt Watson and Crick had stolen credit for her work—though, as Cobb makes clear, this does not excuse their odd acknowledgment in the 1953 paper, or Watson’s sexist and inaccurate portrait of her in his 1968 book. In fact, as Cobb shows, Crick also failed to acknowledge Franklin’s achievements as a first-rate scientist. And as the biography makes clear, Crick had a penchant for poaching other researchers’ data, which hurt his reputation: he was, according to the MRC lab’s Lawrence Bragg, “the sort of chap who was always doing someone else’s crossword.” Contemporary efforts to credit Franklin for her contribution to solving the structure of DNA are well justified.

What Crick excelled at, as seen with the double-helical model, was solving scientific puzzles, even if he never did an experiment on the topic. And he rarely performed experiments; his method, rather, was to evaluate all available biological evidence and consider the physical and chemical constraints, then draw out the logical possibilities. Crick did his best work when he had a sparring partner, always a man and usually someone a bit younger. Crick’s next long-term collaborator after Watson was the South African Sydney Brenner, an experimentalist who worked on bacteriophages. Crick was able to engineer Brenner’s 1956 move to the MRC unit at Cambridge, and together they attacked the genetic code, a topic Crick as theorist had already been tackling. In 1954, Crick had argued for the existence of a mediating molecule between DNA and its encoded protein, an “adaptor” to select the right amino acids in protein synthesis. In 1956, Crick published a theoretical paper on “comma-less codes” that found a way to reduce the 64 possible three-base combinations in DNA to 20 possibilities, exactly matching the number of amino acids. It was completely wrong but influential. His thinking about a triplet code and the role of adaptor molecules predicted key discoveries of the following decade.

Another major contribution was Crick’s 1957 paper “On Protein Synthesis,” which postulated a one-to-one correspondence between the nucleic acid gene and the corresponding protein structure, both of which were long, linear molecules. He proposed what he called the “Central Dogma,” the idea that sequence information can flow among nucleic acids (such as DNA to DNA or DNA to RNA) or from nucleic acids to protein (namely RNA to protein) but not from protein back to nucleic acids. Watson then popularized Crick’s idea and the familiar triangular diagram in his 1965 textbook Molecular Biology of the Gene, which remains a staple of biological pedagogy. In the 1970s, the discovery of intervening sequences (or introns) in the genes of higher organisms raised new questions about the role of noncoding DNA. Crick advanced the idea, suggested by Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene (1976) and picked up by Crick’s collaborator Leslie Orgel, that the genome contained “selfish DNA” whose only function was to perpetuate its existence. As these examples illustrate, Crick’s conceptual fingerprints are all over molecular biology. Sometimes he anticipated experimental findings through inference and logic; other times he clarified or trademarked concepts already circulating. He also promoted ideas, such as “panspermia” (the extraterrestrial origin of life) or his model for chromosome organization, that flopped.

In the 1970s, with the United Kingdom’s mandatory retirement age looming, Crick decided to move to an endowed position at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. There Crick had few demands on his time, a beautiful setting, and a budget to fly in scientific visitors. He could simply cogitate on his new topic, the brain. Finding a way into the nervous system was not easy; Crick settled on visual perception as a tractable problem. His role as a theorist in molecular biology had been exceptional. Neurobiology, too, was populated by experimentalists working on many different organisms and using various techniques, and philosophers also weighed in on how humans think. Much more animal than human data existed, and the best-studied nervous systems were of marine invertebrates (such as the giant squid). Crick found himself arguing for the importance of experimental data, not just logic, even as he depended on others to produce it. In 1985, he met Christof Koch, a former physicist who had turned his attention to neurophysiology and was about to join the faculty at Caltech. Koch became Crick’s close collaborator for nearly two decades and a kind of scientific son. They tackled the ultimate problem: human consciousness. Cobb argues that Crick made fundamental contributions to neuroscience while in California. I, however, am not convinced.

Many biographies use a singular life as a kaleidoscope to refract a historical period and view its patterns. Janet Browne’s magisterial biography of Charles Darwin is an excellent example. Cobb’s biography does something different. His Crick was both the consummate insider and a scientific outlier. To be sure, Crick was shaped by pivotal developments in the 20th century, including the mobilization of science for war, the growth of the political Left in academia, even the Beat movement. Yet Crick remained an anachronism, a scientist who mainly talked, thought, and wrote—and whose gregarious way of working belies the image of the solitary genius. By virtue of his appointments at the MRC and then the Salk Institute, he had free rein to work without having to ask for support. The status of being a Nobel Prize recipient for one of the signature discoveries of the 20th century secured these privileges. In Francis Crick, then, we have a rare biological theorist whose models made possible the scientific world of late capitalism, which left him behind.