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.
I don’t think in my case there was one special person who made a large difference, but I think there were several people who made a considerable difference. For example, when I- in the war when I went and worked in the Admiralty, I worked with group of people headed- headed by a man called Massey, Professor Harry Massey. He seemed to be a very venerable figure to me because he was a full professor as they say here and he was a fellow of the Royal Society and so on. And I thought he was, it turned out he was 34, I think, at the time, it turned out afterwards but I sort of thought of him as much older. And it’s interesting that I don’t think I was aware specially of being influenced by him until I heard him give a talk, many years later, at a dinner of the Royal Society. And he gave a- instead of giving a sort of rather frivolous after dinner talk, he gave a quite interesting and serious one. To my astonishment he kept repeating a lot of my ideas. Well, I realised he hadn’t got the ideas from me, I got them from him, you see, but I hadn’t realised I got them from him until I heard him talk that way. So you can have a lot of influence of that sort. I knew I was influenced by him but I didn’t realise quite to what extent and I was certainly influenced by Bragg, the younger Bragg, as a crystallographer and also by Linus Pauling. But that was a more indirect influence, not so much a personal one, but just following the way he did his work. So there are a number of influences of that sort but there wasn’t, I think, one person who made an enormous difference, there were several people who made a considerable difference.
Title: Influences
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, 39 seconds
Date story recorded/uploaded:
1993
Date story went live:
24 January 2008
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