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.
No, curiously enough I don’t remember the first time I met Jim, no. I do remember going home and Odile saying Max, that’s Max Perutz, was around here with a young American and you know what, he had no hair, I mean he had a crew cut. It was the first time she’d seen a crew cut. So that’s the first time Odile must- must’ve seen him and I must have seen him very shortly afterwards but I don’t remember the actual introduction. I don’t see why one should; it would be not notably special thing in first contact. It was only after we had talked for some days or a week or so, I think, or probably quite soon that we realised how common our interests were and how different our backgrounds were, you see. Because, he didn’t know anything about crystallography by which time I’d known a certain amount, how to solve crystal structures by x-ray defraction and I didn’t know much about the phage group which he knew about and all- a lot of the people in America that I had read about, he knew personally; so we did have different backgrounds but we had the same interests. We both thought that finding the structure of the gene was the key problem whereas my two colleagues, Perutz and Kendrew, were merely keen on getting protein structure, they weren’t interested in genes as such. Of course they were interested in genes in a general sense but it wasn’t part of their daily work. Nor was it of mine - it was done on the side, you might say.
Title: James Watson (Part 1)
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, 25 seconds
Date story recorded/uploaded:
1993
Date story went live:
24 January 2008
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