Francis Crick

Francis Crick (1916-2004) was an English molecular biologist and biophysicist whose determination of DNA's structure supplied medicine with the physical basis for genetic disease, diagnosis and, eventually, gene therapy. Working at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory from 1949 to 1977, Crick, together with James Watson and drawing on X-ray diffraction data produced by Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, proposed in 1953 that DNA takes the shape of a double helix, explaining both how genetic information is stored and how it is copied when cells divide. Crick shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Watson and Wilkins for this work. He went on to help establish the field of molecular biology as a rigorous medical and biological science, articulating the central dogma describing how genetic information flows from DNA to RNA to protein, before turning to theoretical neuroscience later in his career.