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.
It’s very difficult to give advice because we have this, of course, for the young people who come here once a year or so to the Salk. Because the Salk has a thing one Saturday, I think, where they have pupils from the local high schools come, selected ones and they get some talks and shown around labs and shown what goes on. Well, what one tends to say is rather platitudinous. You say shouldn’t go into science unless you’re really deeply interested in it, unless you feel strongly, because the work is very demanding. I mean you have to work long hours and so on and you don’t necessarily get paid very well, certainly at the beginning and unless you’re really vitally interested in it you would- you know you wouldn’t- you’d want to go on and do something else. So that’s one of the things that one does. When you come down to more practical things, well you- you should say well, I think it depends on the individual person and then you have to ask them which bit are they interested in, how mathematical are they, do they like using their hands and things like that. And then you have to go on from what they say to give them some practical advice in that direction. But really when it comes to more detailed advice as to about careers, as to which university they should try go to I wouldn’t be the person best qualified to do that. There are people who do give that advice.
Title: Giving advice to young scientists
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, 23 seconds
Date story recorded/uploaded:
1993
Date story went live:
24 January 2008
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