The late Francis Crick, one of Britain's most famous scientists, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. He is best known for his discovery, jointly with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, of the double helix structure of DNA, though he also made important contributions in understanding the genetic code and was exploring the basis of consciousness in the years leading up to his death in 2004.
If we take the case of biology, for example, we don’t know how you build a hand. We know- we believe we understood- understand a lot of the principles involved, we don’t think there’s anything deeply mysterious but it’s a very complicated operation in which we have to unscramble just all the detailed way the molecules interact in order to get the structured shape of a hand with the bones and the nerves and the right number of fingers but of course sometimes you get people with an extra finger and so on. We don’t understand developmental biology. That will probably be understood, I would say, within a relatively short time, tens of years and- but the- and the other thing that we particularly don’t understand is the way our brains work. We know an enormous amount about- about bits of our brains and psychological things but they don’t click together in a- in a really- in a picture so that- in such- a good outline picture that we can answer the sort of simple questions you would ask, such as what is memory, and what happens when I- I see a red- red ball or something like that. We can’t really answer those questions yet and the final question we have to- the final broad subject that we have to address in biology is the whole nature of evolution. We think we understand broadly the evolutionary process but we certainly don’t understand it in detail. How can we understand how you evolve a hand unless you know how you make a hand now, for example? So we have all those things, so it’s an immense amount of biological knowledge, let alone all the practical knowledge which will come out, how to get better crops, better treatment for diseases and so on and so forth.
Title: What's left to understand in biology?
Listeners:
Christopher Sykes
Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.
In 1993 he and his wife, Lotte, made a series for BBC2 called 'Seven
Wonders of the World', in which outstanding scientists were invited to
talk about themselves and their own seven wonders... Francis Crick
declined to play this particular game (on the basis that 'everything is
wonderful'), but he did agree to spend a couple of hours talking about
his life and and work. The footage did not appear in the 'Seven
Wonders' series, and has never been publicly shown. When Crick died in the summer of 2004, BBC TV kindly gave permission for it to be included in 'Peoples Archive'.
Technical note: the videotapes from which the Peoples Archive streaming version has been prepared had timecode-in-vision in the lower third of the picture. We have reframed the material to exclude this timecode because it is distracting, although this does mean that the image is sometimes a more extreme close-up than either director or cameraman ever intended!
Duration:
1 minute, 37 seconds
Date story recorded/uploaded:
1993
Date story went live:
24 January 2008
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