Francis Crick

by Matt Ridley

HarperCollins £12.99, pp213

In 1955, Francis Crick had his first meeting with Nevill Mott, who had just taken over as head of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, the centre where Crick, with American Jim Watson, had recently uncovered DNA's double helical structure. The scientist was keen to impress his new boss. 'I must introduce you to Watson,' Crick remarked. Mott looked aghast. 'Watson? Watson?' he stammered. 'I thought you were Watson-Crick.'

Such a conflation of identity is telling, for if such an august scientist as Mott could be so wrong about these DNA pioneers and assume them to be a single person, what chance has the public of understanding their separate roles and personalities. Indeed, 50 years later, the two men are still regarded more as a double act - molecular biology's Lennon and McCartney - than as a pair of individuals.

A biography of Crick is, therefore, timely in helping to put this truly great British scientist in perspective. This, as Matt Ridley makes clear, was a man who gave far more to the world than just the double helix. Having uncovered DNA's structure, for which he and Watson won a Nobel Prize, and shown it to be the stuff from which our genes are made, 'the ebullient, loquacious, charming, sceptical and tenacious' Crick (Ridley's words) then orchestrated a programme that showed how DNA makes the proteins from which we are constructed. The human genome project and modern biotechnology emanated from these efforts.

Shamefully, Crick was denied a second Nobel, although his genius was widely acknowledged. As Nobel Prize-winning biologist Jacques Monod put it: 'No man discovered or created molecular biology. But one man dominates intellectually the whole field because he knows the most and understands the most: Francis Crick.'

Then, at the summit of this career in 1976, Crick simply abandoned DNA research and emigrated to the Salk Institute, outside San Diego, where he devoted the rest of his intellectual life to brain research. Having uncovered the secret of life, he now struggled to reveal the secret of consciousness. He died, in 2003, still pursuing that goal.

By contrast, Watson quickly settled for life as a panjandrum, as administrative head of the US Cold Spring Laboratory. But then, the pair were different in many, striking ways. Watson was a royalist anglophile. Crick, by contrast, was a republican, atheist, libertarian, drug-taking womaniser. He once wrote: 'Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children', while his Who's Who entry for recreation was listed as 'conversation, especially with pretty women'.

His Cambridge parties, held at the drop of a hat or, more accurately, a joint, were famous, as Ridley reveals. 'A typical party, organised on the slightest pretext, would fill all four floors of the Golden Helix [the Crick household] with friends, music (Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells was a favourite), punchbowls of drink and the scent of the odd joint in the air.' Through all this, Crick, although married, flirted with breathtaking candour but 'in such a gallant and open way that few were offended and most were charmed'.

He campaigned for the legalisation of drugs and came perilously close to being investigated by the police when an acquaintance was jailed for manufacturing LSD (one of Crick's drugs of choice). One cannot imagine the tight-laced Watson being involved in such shenanigans.

Nevertheless, the pair got on well, with one exception. Shortly after their DNA discovery, Crick, then strapped for cash, wanted to make some BBC broadcasts on the subject. Watson objected vociferously and accused him of self-publicity. Crick backed down, only to discover a few years later that Watson had written his own account, The Double Helix, which begins with the sentence: 'I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood.' Crick was infuriated, but despite involving lawyers, failed to have those words removed. In the end, however, he simply forgave Watson.

From the pages of this biography, Crick emerges as a powerful, dominating figure who ruled seminars and parties with equal ease, and Ridley, an experienced science writer, with a neat turn of phrase and a proper appreciation of brevity, can be satisfied he has done justice to his subject. His book has pace, conciseness and wit.

Two flaws mar the proceedings, however. Ridley's explanations of the unravelling of DNA's structure are drowned in detail and desperately cry out for editing. This is a sin of enthusiasm, however. Less forgivable is the exclusion of an index which, in a book of this importance, is simple sloppiness on the part of Ridley's publisher.

For all that, the book is a delight, though it does not quite sustain Ridley's case that 'because of the momentous nature of his discoveries, Francis Crick must eventually be bracketed with Galileo, Darwin and Einstein'. Nearly, but not quite.