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Francis Crick, hunter of life's secrets

2011; Wiley; Volume: 39; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/bmb.20462

1539-3429

Christopher K. Mathews,

Philosophy and History of Science

Olby, Robert, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Cold Spring Harbor, New York, 2009. ISBN-10: 0879697989, ISBN-13: 978-0879697983, 45.00. Christopher K. Mathews*, * Oregon State University, Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Corvallis, Oregon 97331-7305. Writing the history of the discovery of the DNA double helix has become something of a cottage industry. No wonder; the story combines perhaps the greatest scientific discovery of the 20th century with some of the most colorful characters you will meet, either in or out of science. One of the earliest narrators was one of the central characters—James Watson, whose “The Double Helix” was published in 1968, followed by Professor Olby's own “The Path to the Double Helix,” in 1974. Other participants chipped in with their own accounts in “Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology” (1966; John Cairns, ed.). The story was retold in Horace Judson's “The Eighth Day of Creation” (1979). The story was even filmed, with Jeff Goldblum typecast as Watson. Professor Olby's latest work, “Francis Crick, Hunter of Life's Secrets,” retells the story, grippingly and entertainingly. However, the double helix is a small part of this book, which is a complete (and authorized) biography of Francis Crick, written at Crick's request—with the proviso that it can not be published until after his own death, which occurred in 2004. Olby had access to an amazing amount of material, in addition to Crick's own papers. The book he has produced is an impressive work of scholarship, but it is also so absorbingly written that I often felt that I was reading a novel. I have reviewed quite a few books for BAMBED and other journals, but this is the first of these books that I actually read from cover to cover. One surprising feature of Crick's life story is the ordinariness of his early years, during which he was recognized as bright, but with no indication of his towering intellect. His failure to pass a required Latin exam cost him a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge, and he had to settle for University College London (UCL), where the physics program was competent at best, but lacking in atomic structure and quantum mechanics. He received a second as his undergraduate degree, meaning that he had to settle for remaining at UCL for his doctoral program. His studies were interrupted by the war, and he served as a Civilian Scientist with the Royal Navy from 1940 until 1947. Olby does a wonderful job describing Crick's contributions in designing mines, which had a real effect on the progress of the war. Britain's mines sank nearly twice as many German and Italian ships as the number of British ships sunk by the Germans. After the war Crick had become interested in biology, and he turned down a permanent position as a physicist with the Royal Navy. He still needed to complete his Ph.D. Fortunately for Crick, the equipment he had built at UCL for his thesis research had been destroyed in the war, so he had to start anew, and he was admitted for graduate study at Cambridge. Although he clearly desired to link his physics background with studies on virus or protein structure, he was shunted through the vagaries of what seems an old-boy network to a laboratory where he studied the viscosity of cells undergoing mitosis. It took 2 years before he was able, through eventual contact with Sir Lawrence Bragg and Max Perutz, to begin to do crystallographic work with proteins. The upshot was that when Watson arrived at the Cavendish Laboratory in late 1951, Crick had not completed his Ph.D. thesis. In fact, he defended his thesis in August 1953, several months after publication of the Nature paper with Watson, which made them both famous. Even then, his association with the MRC Unit at Cambridge continued to be tenuous at best, and he was obliged to go to the United States for a thoroughly unrewarding year at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute before returning to a semipermanent position in Cambridge. The Nobel Prize in 1962, shared with Watson and Maurice Wilkins, made him a bit more welcome at Cambridge, where some of the senior people became more willing to overlook his brashness and willingness to criticize any ideas or experiments without regard for whom he might be offending. I wondered how Perutz and John Kendrew and Wilkins, who were all contemporaries of Crick, and who also were affected by the war, had managed to launch their early careers so much more effectively than had Crick. I especially enjoyed Olby's account of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Crick and Sydney Brenner collaborated in trying to define the genetic code through genetic experiments with T4 phage and acridine dyes, at the same time that Marshall Nirenberg and later Gobind Khorana were using wet-lab biochemistry to attack the same problem. Olby describes an intriguing mixture of competitiveness and admiration in Crick's relationships with Nirenberg, and indeed, both the genetics and the biochemistry were essential to our eventual understanding of the code. What I especially appreciated about the book was how Olby, who is a historian, managed to learn enough X-ray crystallography and molecular genetics to explain them clearly to the nonscientists who will read this book. I was even more impressed with his descriptions of Crick's venture into neurobiology in the latter decades of his life. I can not evaluate Olby's knowledge of neuroscience, but the quality of his explanations of the earlier work on protein and DNA structure and gene expression are excellent. Olby's accounts of Crick's first encounters with Erwin Chargaff make them sound much more cordial than what I had been led to believe, even though Chargaff did describe Watson and Crick as “two pitchmen in search of a helix.” In that context, my mind went back to 1962, when the Watson–Crick–Wilkins Nobel Prize was announced. At that time, I was a postdoc with Seymour Cohen, who had been Chargaff's first graduate student. Seymour opined that if Wilkins had been selected to share the prize with Watson and Crick, Chargaff should have been selected also. Of course, the Nobel prohibition against sharing the prize more than three ways ruled out that possibility, but I agree with Seymour; the Chargaff rules on DNA base composition were equal in importance to the X-ray diffraction data. I was struck by one passage in the book: “…mindful of the invitations for Crick to join the staff at the National Institutes of Health, Oregon State University, and Harvard University in the 1950s, there was fear among British scientists that he might one day leave the MRC and the United Kingdom.” I had not been aware that my institution tried to recruit Crick (long before my own tenure at Oregon State), but I tried to imagine the culture shock that would have occurred had the Crick described in this book encountered the Oregon State University of the 1950s (satirized so maliciously in Bernard Malamud's “A New Life”). That irrelevance aside, I greatly enjoyed reading this book and recommend it to anyone interested in learning how the biology of the 1950s and 1960s shaped the biology we know today, as well as the influence of Francis Crick on contemporary neurobiology.