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 may have a collaboration where one is an expert at one part of the technique and another at the other and you work together in that way and so on and so. That’s one way but of course if we’re talking about more ideas and things, yes, it is important to be candid and not to be afraid of saying something silly. And equally when whoever it is you are talking to says something, it’s your obligation to try and show what’s wrong with it as well as appreciating whether it’s a good idea or not you see, so that, but this comes quiet naturally to people especially younger people. And of course it does help, the tradition that you have especially in America of not showing undue respect for your elders which is a great handicap in Japanese science, for example, where it’s not polite to contradict the senior person.But didn’t you expect respect?I much prefer it when somebody contradicts me as long as it- in a reasonable number of instances they turn out to be right. If somebody contradicts me constantly and was constantly wrong I wouldn’t particularly enjoy that but I don’t feel I’m getting anywhere in a discussion and this is getting more difficult as you get older because younger people are more reluctant to or don’t think it’s worth their while or things of that sort so it is more difficult.This, I mean, I suppose that your collaboration with Watson is one of the great, I suppose it’s difficult for you, perhaps, to put yourself outside of it, but it is one of the great collaborations isn’t it, like Hardy and Littlewood or, or…?Yes, except it didn’t go on for such a long time as Hardy and Littlewood I think. I mean it was mainly the two years that Jim was there the first time and then a little bit later when he came on a second visit and then when he went- when he went back and resumed his job at Harvard. It isn’t that we didn’t see each other and so on but there wasn’t the close interchange. It does help very much if- if you’re together in the same place.So your collaboration with Sydney Brenner would be more…?Well in that case, of course we were sharing an office but of course Sydney was doing experiments a lot of the time so we weren’t in the office, you know, the whole working day together. I was usually in the office, he would come into the office for part of the day.
Title: What makes a good collaboration?
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, 16 seconds
Date story recorded/uploaded:
1993
Date story went live:
24 January 2008
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