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.
In order to be accepted as an apprentice, you have to have show that you’ve done well at exams and you have to give the impression that you’re sort of reasonably hard working and that you’re bright and all those things. And obviously therefore if you get taken on with a very good school, Harvard, Stanford, Caltech, a number of other ones of that sort, the chances are that you’ll then have- be sufficiently qualified to go, either stay there, or usually in America go to another place where you will work under somebody and that is your apprenticeship. When you get- when you’re working for your doctorate, I mean, the so called graduate student in the scientific world is the lowest form of life really. He’s the one- he is the apprentice- he is like the apprentice who fills in the little bit corner of the picture that the master allows him to do while he’s doing the interesting parts as they did in the Renaissance and things like that, you see. So- so- and then when you’ve got your PhD, then there’s usually another year or two when you’re what’s called a post doc, a post doctoral. And that’s a very crucial part of your career because again you have to get- usually go somewhere else, not always, and taken on and now you’re beginning to choose what you want to do rather than what was suggested, you see. And that’s when you begin to practice, of course. Some people are so good that they can accelerate that somewhat, but that’s the normal course so you certainly serve an apprenticeship. It would be very difficult to do scientific research unless you did it with someone because there are not only a lot of little tricks and things to learn but the whole scientific attitude has be absorbed; and what you do about publication and nowadays what you have to do in order to get money, you see, which doesn’t happen automatically by any means, to write grant requests and so on. So a lot of skills of that sort which you- which you have to learn.
Title: How to become a scientific apprentice
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, 45 seconds
Date story recorded/uploaded:
1993
Date story went live:
24 January 2008
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