Crick Frances Harry Compton was one of two molecular biologists who unraveled the mystery of the structure of the genetic information carrier (DNA), thereby laying the foundation for modern molecular biology. Since this fundamental discovery, he has made significant contributions to the understanding of the genetic code and gene function, as well as to neurobiology. Shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins for elucidating the structure of DNA.
Francis Crick: biography
The elder of two sons, Francis, was born to Harry Crick and Elizabeth Ann Wilkins on June 8, 1916, in Northampton, England. He studied at the local gymnasium and at an early age became interested in experiments, often accompanied by chemical explosions. At school he won a prize for picking wildflowers. In addition, he was obsessed with tennis, but was not very interested in other games and sports. At the age of 14, Francis received a scholarship to Mill Hill School in north London. Four years later, at 18, he entered University College. By the time he came of age, his parents had moved from Northampton to Mill Hill, allowing Francis to live at home while studying. He graduated with honors in physics.
After his undergraduate studies, Francis Crick, under the direction of da Costa Andrade at University College, studied the viscosity of water under pressure and at high temperatures. In 1940, Francis received a civilian post at the Admiralty, where he worked on the design of anti-ship mines. Earlier in the year, Crick married Ruth Doreen Dodd. Their son Michael was born during the air raid on London on November 25, 1940. Towards the end of the war, Francis was assigned to scientific intelligence at the British Admiralty headquarters in Whitehall, where he worked on weapons development.
On the border between living and nonliving
Realizing that he would need additional training to satisfy his desire to pursue basic research, Crick decided to work toward an advanced degree. According to him, he was fascinated by two areas of biology - the boundary between living and nonliving and the activity of the brain. Crick chose the first, despite knowing little about the subject. After preliminary research at University College in 1947, he settled on a program in a laboratory at Cambridge under the direction of Arthur Hughes to work on the physical properties of the cytoplasm of cultured chicken fibroblasts.
Two years later Crick joined the Medical Research Council group at the Cavendish Laboratory. It included British academics Max Perutz and John Kendrew (future Nobel laureates). Francis began collaborating with them, ostensibly to study the structure of proteins, but in reality to work with Watson to unravel the structure of DNA.
Double helix
In 1947, Francis Crick divorced Doreen and in 1949 married Odile Speed, an art student whom he had met while she was serving in the navy during his service in the Admiralty. Their marriage coincided with the beginning of his PhD work on X-ray diffraction of proteins. This is a method for studying the crystal structure of molecules, allowing one to determine the elements of their three-dimensional structure.
In 1941, the Cavendish Laboratory was led by Sir William Lawrence Bragg, who had pioneered X-ray diffraction forty years earlier. In 1951, Crick was joined by James Watson, a visiting American who had studied under the Italian physician Salvador Edward Luria and was part of a group of physicists studying bacterial viruses known as bacteriophages.
Like his colleagues, Watson was interested in uncovering the composition of genes and thought that unraveling the structure of DNA was the most promising solution. The informal partnership between Crick and Watson developed due to similar ambitions and similar thought processes. Their experiences complemented each other. By the time they first met, Crick knew a lot about X-ray diffraction and protein structure, and Watson was well versed in bacteriophages and bacterial genetics.
Franklin Data
Francis Crick and were aware of the work of biochemists Maurice Wilkins and King's College London, who used X-ray diffraction to study the structure of DNA. Crick, in particular, encouraged the London group to build models similar to those made in the United States to solve the problem of the alpha helix of the protein. Pauling, the father of the concept of chemical bonding, showed that proteins have a three-dimensional structure and are not simply linear chains of amino acids.
Wilkins and Franklin, acting independently, preferred the more deliberate experimental approach to Pauling's theoretical, modeling method, which Francis adhered to. Since the group at King's College did not respond to their proposals, Crick and Watson devoted part of a two-year period to discussion and speculation. In early 1953, they began building models of DNA.
DNA structure
Using Franklin's X-ray diffraction data, and through much trial and error, they created a model of the deoxyribonucleic acid molecule that agreed with the findings of the London group and the data of biochemist Erwin Chargaff. In 1950, the latter demonstrated that the relative amounts of the four nucleotides that make up DNA follow certain rules, one of which was the correspondence of the amount of adenine (A) to the amount of thymine (T) and the amount of guanine (G) to the amount of cytosine (C). This relationship suggests the pairing of A and T and G and C, refuting the idea that DNA is nothing more than a tetranucleotide, that is, a simple molecule consisting of all four bases.
In the spring and summer of 1953, Watson and Crick wrote four papers on the structure and putative functions of deoxyribonucleic acid, the first of which appeared on April 25 in the journal Nature. The publications were accompanied by works by Wilkins, Franklin and their colleagues, who presented experimental evidence of the model. Watson won the lot and put his surname first, thus forever linking the fundamental scientific achievement with the Watson Creek pair.
Genetic code
Over the next few years, Francis Crick studied the relationship between DNA and his collaboration with Vernon Ingram led to the demonstration in 1956 that the composition of sickle cell hemoglobin was one amino acid different from normal hemoglobin. The study provided evidence that genetic diseases may be linked to the DNA-protein ratio.
Around this time, South African geneticist and molecular biologist Sydney Brenner joined Crick at the Cavendish Laboratory. They began to tackle the "coding problem" - determining how the sequence of DNA bases forms the sequence of amino acids in a protein. The work was first presented in 1957 under the title “On Protein Synthesis.” In it, Crick formulated the basic postulate of molecular biology, according to which information transferred to a protein cannot be returned. He predicted the mechanism of protein synthesis by transferring information from DNA to RNA and from RNA to protein.
Salk Institute
In 1976, while on leave, Crick was offered a permanent position at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. He agreed and worked at the Salk Institute for the rest of his life, including as director. Here Crick began to study the functioning of the brain, which had interested him since the beginning of his scientific career. He was mainly concerned with consciousness and tried to approach this problem through the study of vision. Crick published several speculative works on the mechanisms of dreams and attention, but, as he wrote in his autobiography, he had yet to produce any theory that was both new and convincingly explained many experimental facts.
An interesting episode of his work at the Salk Institute was the development of his idea of “directed panspermia.” Together with Leslie Orgel, he published a book in which he proposed that microbes were floating in outer space to eventually reach and seed the Earth, and that this was done as a result of the actions of “someone”. Thus, Francis Crick refuted the theory of creationism by demonstrating how speculative ideas can be presented.
Scientist Awards
During his career as an energetic theorist of modern biology, Francis Crick collected, improved, and synthesized the experimental work of others and brought his unusual insights to bear on fundamental problems in science. His extraordinary efforts earned him many awards in addition to the Nobel Prize. These include the Lasker Prize, the Charles Mayer Prize of the French Academy of Sciences and the Copley Medal of the Royal Society. In 1991 he was accepted into the Order of Merit.
Crick died on July 28, 2004 in San Diego at the age of 88. In 2016, the Francis Crick Institute was built in north London. The £660 million structure became the largest biomedical research center in Europe.
American biochemist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 (together with Francis Crick And Maurice Wilkins) with the wording: “for their discovery of the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance in the transmission of information in living matter.”
Like his future co-author on the discovery of the structure of DNA Francis Crick, James Watson after reading a book Erwin Schrödinger“What is life from the point of view of physics?”, I decided to change my previous passion for ornithology and study genetics.
Matt Ridley, Genome: autobiography of a species in 23 chapters, M., Eksmo, 2009, p. 69.
“The biologist Watson, having seen at a conference on the structure of biological macromolecules in Naples (1951) an X-ray diffraction pattern of DNA made M. Wilkins, realized that since the X-ray diffraction pattern has a large number of diffraction maxima, this apparently indicates its crystalline regular structure. He realized that the key to unraveling the mystery of the gene was X-ray diffraction analysis of the structure of the DNA molecule in combination with chemical analysis.
He took a scientific job at the Cavendish Physical Laboratory (Cambridge), where the physicist Francis Crick, who abandoned physics for biology, under the guidance of chemist Max Perutz, used radiography as a method for analyzing the structure of organic molecules.
“From the very first day spent in the laboratory,” writes James Watson, “it became clear to me that I would stay in Cambridge for a long time. It would be blatant stupidity to leave, since I would lose the unique opportunity to talk with Francis Crick. In Max's laboratory, there was a person who knew that DNA is more important than proteins - this was real luck... Our lunchtime conversations soon centered around one topic: how are genes connected to each other? A few days after my arrival, we already knew what we should do...” And further: “...often, having reached a dead end with his equations, he began to ask me about phages. Or he supplied me with information on crystallography, which could have been collected in the usual way only at the cost of tedious study of special journals.” (James Watson, Double Helix, M., “World”, 1965, p. 61).
Joint creative activity F. Crick And J. Watson took place in continuous communication with Maurice Wilkins, in whose laboratory the clearest X-ray photographs of DNA were taken.
What is significant for us in this example is that three scientists of completely different scientific profiles, having a common field of knowledge and interests, achieved in direct communication the interpenetration of categorical schemes of physics, chemistry and biology, which resulted in the greatest scientific achievement - the establishment of the structure of the carrier of heredity" (See also the selection about the creative work of duets / trios - Note by I.L. Vikentyev).
Allahverdyan, A.G., Moshkova G.Yu., Yurevich A.V., Yaroshevsky M.G., Psychology of Science, M., “Moscow Psychological and Social Institute,” Flint, 1998, p. 91-92.
In 1953, James Watson, together with Francis Crick, built a model of the three-dimensional structure of this molecule (the Watson-Crick model).
He described the end of this scientific race as follows: “We immediately put the shiny metal plates to work and began to build a model in which for the first time all the components of DNA were visible. In about an hour, I had arranged the atoms as required by both the x-ray data and the laws of stereochemistry. The result is a double right-handed spiral with the opposite direction of the chains.”
James Watson, Double Helix, M., "World", 1969, p. 135.
The Watson-Crick model made it possible to explain how replication (that is, doubling) of a DNA molecule occurs during cell division, and laid the foundation for the study of the processes of transfer of genetic information during protein synthesis.
In 1989-1992 James Watson led the Human Genome program, a program to decipher the sequence of human DNA, carried out by the US National Institutes of Health. He is the first person whose genome has been completely sequenced.
In 2007, James Watson argued in favor of the fact that representatives of different races have different intellectual abilities, which is determined genetically, here is this quote:
“I actually see a bleak outlook for Africa because our entire social policy is based on the assumption that they have the same intelligence as us - when all the tests say they don’t.”
And here’s what he said about constructive criticism: “In order to more often emerge from intellectual tournaments as winners rather than losers, you need to take part in unexpected intellectual duels. There is no substitute for the company of people who have sufficient knowledge and ability to find errors in your reasoning or provide you with facts that can confirm or refute your opinion.
The greater the mental acuity of those around you, the sharper your own mind will become.
This goes against human nature, especially male nature, but the position of leader of the pack can become an obstacle to more important achievements.
It is much better to be the least advanced chemist in a first-class chemistry department than to be the first-magnitude star in a less brilliant department. By the early fifties, scientific interactions Linus Pauling with colleagues were reduced mainly to monologues rather than dialogues. He wanted to be an object of admiration, not criticism.”
James Watson, Avoid Boring. Lessons of life, life and science, “Astrel”; "Corpus", 2010, p. 160.
James Watson is a pioneer of molecular biology who, along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, is considered the discoverer of the DNA double helix. In 1962, they received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work.
James Watson: biography
Born in Chicago, USA, April 6, 1928. He attended Horace Mann School and then South Shore High School. At the age of 15, he entered the University of Chicago under an experimental scholarship program for gifted children. An interest in bird life led James Watson to study biology, and in 1947 he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology. After reading Erwin Schrödinger's landmark book What is Life? he switched to genetics.
After being rejected by Caltech and Harvard, James Watson won a scholarship to graduate school at Indiana University. In 1950, for his work on the effects of X-ray radiation on the reproduction of bacteriophage viruses, he was awarded a doctorate in zoology. From Indiana, Watson moved to Copenhagen and continued studying viruses as a fellow at the National Research Council.
Unravel DNA!
After visiting the New York laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor, where he reviewed the results of Hershey and Chase's research, Watson became convinced that DNA was the molecule responsible for transmitting genetic information. He became fascinated by the idea that if he understood its structure, he could figure out how data was transferred between cells. Virus research no longer interested him as much as this new direction.
In the spring of 1951, at a conference in Naples, he met Maurice Wilkins. The latter demonstrated the results of the first attempts to use X-ray diffraction to image a DNA molecule. Watson, excited by Wilkins' data, arrived in Britain in the autumn. He got a job at the Cavendish Laboratory, where he began collaborating with Francis Crick.
First attempts
In an attempt to unravel the molecular structure of DNA, James Watson and Francis Crick decided to use a model-based approach. Both were convinced that the solution to its structure would play a key role in understanding the transfer of genetic information from parent to daughter cells. Biologists realized that the discovery of the structure of DNA would be a major scientific breakthrough. At the same time, they were aware of the existence of competitors among other scientists, such as Linus Pauling.
Crick and James Watson modeled DNA with great difficulty. None of them had a chemistry background, so they used standard chemistry textbooks to cut out cardboard configurations of chemical bonds. A visiting graduate student noted that, according to new data not in the books, some of his cardboard chemical bonds were used in reverse. Around the same time, Watson attended a lecture by Rosalind Franklin at nearby King's College. Apparently he wasn't listening very carefully.
Unforgivable mistake
As a result of the error, scientists' first attempt to build a DNA model failed. James Watson and Francis Crick constructed a triple helix with the nitrogen bases on the outside of the structure. When they presented the model to their colleagues, Rosalind Franklin harshly criticized it. The results of her research clearly demonstrated the existence of two forms of DNA. The wetter one matched the one Watson and Crick were trying to build, but they created a DNA model without the water present. Franklin noted that if her work were interpreted correctly, the nitrogen bases would be located inside the molecule. Feeling embarrassed by such a public failure, the director of the Cavendish Laboratory recommended that the researchers abandon their approach. Scientists officially moved on to other areas, but privately continued to think about the DNA problem.
Spy discovery
Wilkins, who worked at King's College with Franklin, was in personal conflict with her. Rosalind was so unhappy that she decided to move her research elsewhere. It is not clear how, but Wilkins obtained one of her best X-ray images of a DNA molecule. She might even have given it to him herself when she was cleaning out her office. But it is certain that he took the image out of the laboratory without Franklin's permission and showed it to his friend Watson in Cavendish. Subsequently, in his book “The Double Helix,” he wrote that the moment he saw the photograph, his jaw dropped and his pulse quickened. Everything was incredibly simpler than the A-form obtained earlier. Moreover, the black cross of reflections that dominated the photo could only have arisen from a spiral structure.
Nobel Prize Laureate
Biologists used the new data to create a double-stranded helix model with nitrogenous bases in A-T and C-G pairs at the center. This pairing immediately suggested to Crick that one side of the molecule could serve as a template for precisely repeating DNA sequences to carry genetic information during cell division. This second, successful model was presented in February 1951. In April 1953, they published their findings in the journal Nature. The article caused a sensation. Watson and Crick discovered that DNA has the shape of a double helix, or “spiral staircase.” Two chains in it were disconnected, like a “lightning”, and reproduced the missing parts. Thus, each deoxyribonucleic acid molecule is capable of creating two identical copies.
The abbreviation DNA and the elegant double helix model became known throughout the world. Watson and Crick also became famous. Their discovery revolutionized the study of biology and genetics, making possible the genetic engineering techniques used in modern biotechnology.
The Nature paper led to the Nobel Prize being awarded to them and Wilkins in 1962. Swedish Academy rules allow no more than three scientists to be awarded. Rosalind Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958. Wilkins mentioned her in passing.
The year he received the Nobel Prize, Watson married Elizabeth Lewis. They had two sons: Rufus and Duncan.
Continued work
James Watson continued to work with many other scientists throughout the 1950s. His genius lay in his ability to coordinate the work of different people and combine their results to new conclusions. In 1952, he used a rotating X-ray anode to demonstrate the helical structure of the tobacco mosaic virus. From 1953 to 1955 Watson collaborated with scientists at the California Institute of Technology to model the structure of RNA. From 1955 to 1956 he again worked with Crick to uncover the principles of the structure of viruses. In 1956 he moved to Harvard, where he researched RNA and protein synthesis.
Scandalous chronicle
In 1968, a controversial book about DNA was published, authored by James Watson. "The Double Helix" was full of derogatory comments and vindictive descriptions of many of the people involved in the discovery, especially Rosalind Franklin. Because of this, Harvard Press refused to publish the book. Nevertheless, the work was published and was a great success. In a later edition, Watson apologized for his treatment of Franklin, saying that he was unaware of the pressures she faced as a female researcher in the 1950s. He received the greatest profit from the publication of two textbooks - “Molecular Biology of the Gene” (1965) and “Molecular Biology of the Cell and Recombinant DNA” (updated edition 2002), which are still out of print. In 2007, he published his autobiography, Avoid Boring People. Life lessons in science."
James Watson: contributions to science
In 1968, he became director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. At the time, the institute was experiencing financial difficulties, but Watson was very successful in finding donors. The institution he headed has become a world leader in the level of work in the field of molecular biology. Its employees uncovered the nature of cancer and discovered its genes for the first time. More than 4,000 scientists from around the world come to Cold Spring Harbor each year, such is the profound influence of the Institute for International Genetic Research.
In 1990, Watson was appointed director of the National Institutes of Health's Human Genome Project. He used his fundraising abilities to carry on the project until 1992. He left due to a conflict over patenting genetic information. James Watson believed that this would only interfere with the research of scientists working on the project.
Controversial statements
His stay at Cold Harbor ended abruptly. On October 14, 2007, on the way to a conference in London, he was asked about world events. James Watson, a world-renowned scientist, responded that he was gloomy about Africa's prospects. According to him, all modern social policy is based on the fact that the intelligence of its inhabitants is the same as that of others, but test results indicate that this is not so. He continued his thought with the idea that progress in Africa was hampered by poor genetic material. Public outcry against this remark forced Cold Spring Harbor to ask for his resignation. The scientist later apologized and retracted his remarks, saying that “there is no scientific basis for this.” In his farewell speech, he expressed his vision that "ultimate victory (over cancer and mental illness) is within our reach."
Despite these failures, geneticist James Watson continues to make controversial claims today. In September 2013, at a meeting on brain science at the Allen Institute in Seattle, he again made a controversial statement about his belief that an increase in the diagnosis of hereditary diseases may be associated with later childbearing. “The older you get, the more likely you are to have defective genes,” Watson said, also suggesting that genetic material should be collected from people under 15 years of age for future conception through in vitro fertilization. In his opinion, this would reduce the chances that parents' lives would be ruined by the birth of a child with physical or mental disabilities.
English physicist (by training), winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1962 (together with James Watson And Maurice Wilkins) with the wording: “for their discovery of the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance in the transmission of information in living matter.”
During World War II he worked at the Admiralty, where he developed magnetic and acoustic mines for the British fleet.
In 1946 Francis Creek read the book Erwin Schrödinger: What is life from the point of view of physics? and decided to leave research in physics and take up the problems of biology. He later wrote that in order to move from physics to biology one must “almost be born again.”
In 1947 Francis Creek left the Admiralty, and approximately simultaneously with Linus Pauling hypothesized that the diffraction pattern of proteins was determined by alpha helices wrapped around one another.
Francis Crick was interested in two fundamental unsolved problems in biology:
- How do molecules enable the transition from nonliving to living?
- How does the brain carry out thinking?
In 1951 Francis Creek met James Watson and together they turned to analyzing the structure of DNA in 1953.
"Career F. Crick cannot be called fast and bright. At thirty-five he is still Not received PhD status (PhD approximately corresponds to the title of Candidate of Sciences - Note by I.L. Vikentyev).
German bombs destroyed the laboratory in London where he was supposed to measure the viscosity of warm water under pressure.
Crick was not very upset that his career in physics had reached a dead end. Biology had already attracted him, so he quickly found a job in Cambridge, where his topic was measuring the viscosity of the cytoplasm of cells. In addition, he studied crystallography at Cavendish.
But Crick did not have enough patience to successfully develop his own scientific ideas, nor the proper diligence to develop others. His constant ridicule of others, disregard for his own career, combined with self-confidence and the habit of giving advice to others, irritated his Cavendish colleagues.
But Crick himself was not enthusiastic about the scientific direction of the laboratory, which concentrated exclusively on proteins. He was sure that the search was going in the wrong direction. The secret of genes is hidden not in proteins, but in DNA. Seduced by ideas Watson, he abandoned his own research and focused on studying the DNA molecule.
Thus emerged a great duet of two friendly, rival talents: a young, ambitious American who knows a little biology, and a bright-minded but unfocused thirty-five-year-old Briton who understands physics.
The combination of two opposites caused an exothermic reaction.
Within a few months, having put together their own data and those previously obtained by others, but not processed, two scientists came close to the greatest discovery in the entire history of mankind - deciphering the structure of DNA. […]
But there was no mistake.
Everything turned out to be extremely simple: DNA contains a code written along its entire molecule - an elegantly elongated double helix that can be as long as desired.
The code is copied due to the chemical affinity between the constituent chemical compounds - the letters of the code. The combinations of letters represent the text of the protein molecule, written in an as yet unknown code. The simplicity and elegance of the DNA structure was stunning.
Later Richard Dawkins wrote: “What was truly revolutionary about the post-Watson and Crick era of molecular biology was that the code of life was written down in digital form, incredibly similar to the code of a computer program.”
Matt Ridley, Genome: autobiography of a species in 23 chapters, M., Eksmo, 2009, pp. 69-71.
Having analyzed the received Maurice Wilkins data on X-ray scattering on DNA crystals, Francis Creek together with James Watson built in 1953 a model of the three-dimensional structure of this molecule, called the Watson–Crick Model.
Francis Creek wrote to his son in 1953 proud: “ Jim Watson and I made perhaps the most important discovery... Now we are sure that DNA is a code. Thus, the sequence of bases (“letters”) makes one gene different from another (just as pages of printed text differ from one another). You can imagine how Nature makes copies of genes: if two chains are unwoven into two separate chains, F each chain attaches another chain, then A will always be with T, and G with C, and we will get two copies instead of one. In other words, we think we have found the underlying mechanism by which life comes from life... You can understand how excited we are.”
Quoted in Matt Ridley, Life is a Discrete Code, in: Theories of Everything, ed. John Brockman, M., "Binom"; "Knowledge Laboratory", 2016, p. eleven.
Exactly Francis Creek in 1958 “... with formulated the “central dogma of molecular biology”, according to which the transmission of hereditary information occurs in only one direction, namely from DNA to RNA and from RNA to protein
.
Its meaning is that the genetic information recorded in DNA is realized in the form of proteins, but not directly, but with the help of a related polymer - ribonucleic acid (RNA), and this path from nucleic acids to proteins is irreversible. Thus, DNA is synthesized on DNA, ensuring its own reduplication, i.e. reproduction of the original genetic material over generations. RNA is also synthesized on DNA, resulting in the transcription (transcription) of genetic information into the form of multiple copies of RNA. RNA molecules serve as templates for protein synthesis - genetic information is translated into the form of polypeptide chains.”
Gnatik E.N., Man and his prospects in the light of anthropogenetics: philosophical analysis, M., Publishing House of the Russian Peoples' Friendship University, 2005, p. 71.
“In 1994, a book that caused a wide resonance was published Francis Crick“An amazing hypothesis. Scientific search for the soul."
Crick is skeptical of philosophers and philosophy in general, considering their abstract reasoning unfruitful. Received the Nobel Prize for deciphering DNA (with J. Watson and M. Wilkins), he set himself the following task: to decipher the nature of consciousness on the basis of specific facts about the functioning of the brain.
By and large, he is not concerned with the question “what is consciousness?”, but with how the brain produces it.
He says, "'You,' your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are really nothing more than the behavior of a vast community of nerve cells and their interacting molecules."
Most of all, Crick is interested in the question: what is the nature of the structures and patterns that ensure the connection and unity of the conscious act (“the binding problem”)?
Why do very different stimuli received by the brain become interconnected in such a way that they ultimately produce a unified experience, for example, the image of a walking cat?
It is in the nature of the brain connections, he believes, that one should look for an explanation of the phenomenon of consciousness.
The “amazing hypothesis”, in fact, is that the key to understanding the nature of consciousness and its qualitative images may be the synchronized bursts of neurons recorded in experiments in the range from 35
before 40
Hertz in networks connecting the thalamus with the cerebral cortex.
Naturally, both philosophers and cognitive scientists doubted that from the vibrations of nerve fibers, perhaps actually associated with the manifestation of phenomenal features of experience, it is possible to build hypotheses about consciousness and its cognitive processes of thinking.
Yudina N.S., Consciousness, physicalism, science, in Collection: The problem of consciousness in philosophy and science / Ed. DI. Dubrovsky, M., “Canon +”, 2009, p.93.
English molecular biologist Francis Harry Compton Crick was born in Northampton and was the eldest of two sons of Harry Compton Crick, a wealthy shoe manufacturer, and Anna Elizabeth (Wilkins) Crick. Spending his childhood in Northampton, he attended high school. During the economic crisis that followed the First World War, the family's business affairs declined and Crick's parents moved to London. As a student at Mill Hill School, Crick developed a keen interest in physics, chemistry and mathematics. In 1934 he entered University College London to study physics and graduated three years later with a Bachelor of Science degree. While completing his education at University College, Crick considered the viscosity of water at high temperatures; this work was interrupted in 1939 by the outbreak of the Second World War.
During the war years, Crick worked on the creation of mines in the research laboratory of the British Navy Ministry. For two years after the end of the war, he continued to work in this ministry and it was then that he read Erwin Schrödinger’s famous book “What is Life? Physical Aspects of the Living Cell" (“What Is Life? The Physical Aspects of the Living Cell”), published in 1944. In the book, Schrödinger asks the question: “How can spatio-temporal events occurring in a living organism be explained from the point of view physics and chemistry?
The ideas presented in the book influenced Crick so much that he switched to biology, intending to study particle physics. With the support of Archibald W. Hill, Crick received a Medical Research Council fellowship and began working at the Strangeway Laboratory in Cambridge in 1947. Here he studied biology, organic chemistry, and X-ray diffraction techniques used to determine the spatial structure of molecules. His knowledge of biology expanded significantly after moving in 1949 to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, one of the world centers of molecular biology.
Under the leadership of Max Perutz, Crick studied the molecular structure of proteins, and therefore became interested in the genetic code for the sequence of amino acids in protein molecules. About 20 essential amino acids serve as monomeric units from which all proteins are built. Studying what he defined as “the boundary between the living and the nonliving,” Crick sought to find the chemical basis of genetics, which he believed might lie in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).
Genetics as a science arose in 1866, when Gregor Mendel formulated the position that “elements,” later called genes, determine the inheritance of physical properties. Three years later, Swiss biochemist Friedrich Miescher discovered nucleic acid and showed that it is contained in the cell nucleus. At the turn of the century, scientists discovered that genes are located in chromosomes, the structural elements of the cell nucleus. In the first half of the 20th century. biochemists determined the chemical nature of nucleic acids, and in the 40s. researchers have discovered that genes are made from one of these acids, DNA. It has been proven that genes, or DNA, control the biosynthesis (or formation) of cellular proteins, called enzymes, and thus control the biochemical processes in the cell.
When Crick began working on his doctorate at Cambridge, it was already known that nucleic acids consist of DNA and RNA (ribonucleic acid), each of which is formed by molecules of a pentose monosaccharide (deoxyribose or ribose), phosphate and four nitrogenous bases - adenine, thymine , guanine and cytosine (RNA contains uracil instead of thymine). In 1950, Erwin Chargaff of Columbia University showed that DNA contains equal amounts of these nitrogenous bases. Maurice H.F. Wilkins and his colleague Rosalind Franklin of King's College, University of London, conducted X-ray diffraction studies of DNA molecules and concluded that DNA is shaped like a double helix, resembling a spiral staircase.
In 1951, twenty-three-year-old American biologist James D. Watson invited Crick to work at the Cavendish Laboratory. Subsequently, they established close creative contacts. Building on the early work of Chargaff, Wilkins, and Franklin, Crick and Watson set out to determine the chemical structure of DNA. Over the course of two years, they developed the spatial structure of the DNA molecule by constructing a model of it from balls, pieces of wire and cardboard. According to their model, DNA is a double helix consisting of two chains of a monosaccharide and a phosphate (deoxyribose phosphate) connected by base pairs within the helix, with adenine connected to thymine and guanine to cytosine, and the bases to each other by hydrogen bonds.
The model allowed other researchers to clearly visualize DNA replication. The two strands of the molecule separate at hydrogen bonding sites, like the opening of a zipper, and then a new one is synthesized on each half of the old DNA molecule. The sequence of bases acts as a template, or pattern, for a new molecule.
In 1953, Crick and Watson completed their DNA model. In the same year, Crick received his PhD from Cambridge with a thesis on X-ray diffraction analysis of protein structure. Over the next year, he studied protein structure at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute in New York and lectured at various universities in the United States. Returning to Cambridge in 1954, he continued his research at the Cavendish Laboratory, concentrating on deciphering the genetic code. Originally a theoretician, Crick began working with Sidney Brenner to study genetic mutations in bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacterial cells).
By 1961, three types of RNA were discovered: messenger, ribosomal and transport. Crick and his colleagues proposed a way to read the genetic code. According to Crick's theory, messenger RNA receives genetic information from DNA in the cell nucleus and carries it to ribosomes (sites of protein synthesis) in the cell's cytoplasm. Transfer RNA transfers amino acids to ribosomes.
Messenger and ribosomal RNA, interacting with each other, ensure the connection of amino acids to form protein molecules in the correct sequence. The genetic code is made up of triplets of nitrogenous bases in DNA and RNA for each of the 20 amino acids. Genes are made up of numerous basic triplets, which Crick called codons; codons are the same in different species.
Crick, Wilkins, and Watson shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and their importance for the transmission of information in living systems." A. W. Engström of the Karolinska Institute said at the award ceremony: “The discovery of the spatial molecular structure...DNA is extremely important because it outlines the possibility of understanding in great detail the general and individual characteristics of all living things.” Engström noted that “unraveling the double helical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid with its specific pairing of nitrogenous bases opens up fantastic possibilities for unraveling the details of the control and transmission of genetic information.”
In the year he received the Nobel Prize, Crick became head of the biological laboratory at the University of Cambridge and a foreign member of the Council of the Salk Institute in San Diego (California). In 1977, he moved to San Diego, receiving an invitation to a professorship. At the Salkov Institute, Crick conducted research in the field of neurobiology, in particular studying the mechanisms of vision and dreams. In 1983, together with the English mathematician Graham Mitchison, he proposed that dreams are a side effect of the process by which the human brain frees itself from excessive or unhelpful associations accumulated during wakefulness. Scientists have hypothesized that this form of “reverse learning” exists to prevent neural processes from becoming overloaded.
In his book Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature (1981), Crick noted the amazing similarities of all life forms. “With the exception of mitochondria,” he wrote, “the genetic code is identical in all living objects currently studied.” Citing discoveries in molecular biology, paleontology and cosmology, he proposed that life on Earth may have originated from microorganisms that were dispersed throughout space from another planet; this theory he and his colleague Leslie Orgel called "direct panspermia".
In 1940, Crick married Ruth Doreen Dodd; they had a son. They divorced in 1947, and two years later Crick married Odile Speed. They had two daughters.
Crick's numerous awards include the Charles Leopold Mayer Prize of the French Academy of Sciences (1961), the Scientific Prize of the American Exploration Society (1962), the Royal Medal (1972), the Copley Medal of the Royal Society (1976). Crick is an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Irish Academy, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American National Academy of Sciences.