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.
You have this paradox in biology that, although there may be underlying principles, the actual results are often very, very gadgety. I mean it’s like- it's like an automobile, the basic idea of the internal combustion engine is relatively simple. But if you look at a modern car with all the gadgets for adjusting when the spark comes, for example, with electronic things raising and lowering the windows and all the other things that you have in your car, you see how- what- how much elaboration comes from a quite simple principle of internal combustion. But in that case we know roughly what everything does because it was designed by us. So we know that the muffler reduces the sound, for example, and if you suddenly found your car’s making a very loud noise it’s probably because the muffler’s gone and so on. Well, we have crude knowledge like that but remember in the case of our brains and our bodies, we didn’t design them. They're evolved, and therefore we have to look at it as something that somebody else designed, what’s sometimes called reverse engineering. It happens in the- in the commercial world when one firm produces a gadget and another firm buys it and tries to take it to pieces and find how it works, that’s called reverse engineering. But, in our case, it’s reverse engineering what you might call a foreign culture as we don’t understand the set of ideas which, as it were- there weren’t even any ideas which produced the brain, we don’t understand the principles which produced the brain although we’re groping towards them. So you can see it’s a very complicated and difficult problem. And some people, I mean, I don’t say you, but some people that aren’t scientists might still be tempted to, you know, give up on that and go for the argument from design, although the idea, they believe that-Well yes, of course, but I don’t think you’ll ever, ever satisfy such people until you can give very convincing and detailed explanations which at the moment often we have to do a certain amount of hand waving. We can say we can’t see in principle why it hasn’t been done by- by evolution, by natural selection, but obviously the more cases we have worked out in detail the more we can counter any argument which says 'oh but it couldn’t have happened that way because'. That’s why you need detailed scientific knowledge as well as the principles because you need the detailed knowledge to refute counter arguments.
Title: Molecular biology and understanding the brain (Part 2)
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:
2 minutes, 25 seconds
Date story recorded/uploaded:
1993
Date story went live:
24 January 2008
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