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 had had some more experience and I had worked with scientists of some reasonable standing and so the reason I was able to get into the thing was because of personal recommendations of people who had known me during the war, essentially, basically, Massey for whom I worked and he introduced to me to A.V Hill who is a Nobel Laureate and a physiologist and he introduced me to the Medical Research Council and so on. And then eventually after working in the tissue culture lab they set up this unit in the- in the physics lab and again I went and talked to Perutz and produced a sufficiently favourable impression, so it was all that sort of thing.It sounds like a whole series of accidents that somehow… were you gravitated by accident you think into the right place at the right time issue- as you called it…Well, it looks like it as we know now of course, it was that I was- it was an accident but I was likely to have got into something with that degree of motivation and wanting to get into it. It might have been somewhere else, I mean for all I know, it would have been Oxford. Just- it was just that A.V Hill was a Cambridge man and said you ought to go to Cambridge, you see. And so I went down and talked to several people in Cambridge and that is how I got started and then it was an accident that the Medical Research Council was setting up Perutz. It was certainly an accident that Jim Watson came and that there was work going on in King’s on the experimental side, so it was a whole series of accidents; but if you look at most people’s careers, it is bound to be a series of accidents. I mean- what you have to ask is, what would they have done if this hadn’t happened? Well, it clearly, in the case of the DNA structure, it was a very crucial thing because it gave one a reputation and made it easier to go around and do other things but I would have expected that, nevertheless, that one would have done something. I didn’t have very high expectations of doing things. I thought the problem would last me my lifetime. I had no idea it would be solved within twenty years you see. I mean, it was embarrassing almost, it got to the stage instead of this problem lasting for one’s life, one had to look around for another problem. There- there's plenty to do as we already said.
Title: The road to Cambridge
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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