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 general, you know, the experimentalists in biology, I think, occupy the more important place because there are very few areas in biology where you can do what you could call steady theoretical work. Some of the work, the mathematical work in- to do with evolution would be a case where you can- the theories can make an important contributions and some of the present work being done on how nerve cells behave, a single nerve cell with all the things coming in, that can be done. But the other sort- there is another sort of theory which consists of not so much doing computations to test out a particular idea but having sort of general ideas as in the case of DNA. We had the general ideas, we then had to build the structure and show that it actually could be built but the important thing was having the idea of what we were trying to build and although there is a certain scope for- for people doing that usually it’s better if it’s combined with doing experiments. And if I were younger I think I would try to more, some sort of experiments in some area of brain research but the ones that particularly interested me, interest me are very demanding and time consuming and take rather a long apprenticeship so I don’t do them. So I think what is important really is that different experimentalists should talk to each other and exchange ideas and that is probably important. After all the theory of natural selection was an idea you see when you think about it and sometimes ideas come out of the experiments and sometimes the ideas come first and then the experiments are designed round them and course there’s a constant flux to and fro in most cases.I mean is it temperament that takes a scientist in one direction or another.Yes, well it’s not so much temperament, it’s also ability, some people are very good at doing experiments. And doing experiments is not easy because first of all you have to be fairly meticulous and not too sloppy and do things in the right sort of way and then secondly you have to have a sort of feeling, a sort of green fingers as to when it doesn’t work as to what it is that you can make it to work and that is very difficult to teach and some people seem to have the ability to do that and some people don’t, they just get bogged down in the details.What about you?Well I’m not sure I’m so good at that. I mean the only good experiments I’ve done, when we blundered on, essentially we were doing experiments, I was doing some phage genetics, genetics on bacteria phage, I was doing some bacteria phage genetics and found an odd phenomenon and then did explore it and- and- but the experiments were relatively easy to do and could be done rapidly and- and you could get results very quickly. And there was something to think about because it turned out you could- it was a formal scheme you could put them into which wasn’t at all obvious and was novel and was not unimportant. But I don’t think I was particularly good at biochemical experiments although again it may be if I’d been apprenticed to somebody who was doing biochemical experiments and had stuck at it I would have acquired the- the expertise and- and could then could use my intellectual ability together with the experimental know how.
Title: Theoretical vs experimental biology
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:
3 minutes, 26 seconds
Date story recorded/uploaded:
1993
Date story went live:
24 January 2008
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