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 think he did seem in a hurry. Well, he was young because he was very precocious, he went to the University of Chicago when he was 15, you see, so that’s why he was- he had already got his Ph.D. and had done one year Post Doc. when he came to us and he was 23. Usually, that is the stage at which people are still working on their Ph.D. He was a couple of years ahead roughly speaking and he was young but he was obviously very bright. I mean, you know, you could tell that by just talking to him straight away. And, the fact he had a strange manner, we were used to that sort of thing in Cambridge so it didn’t strike you as particularly odd whereas it probably would strike you as odd- it would strike people as odd in more conventional places.I didn’t know about his manner-Well, you know, he speaks in a funny way and he is apt to express himself- his mind rather freely and a few things like that. These are the sort of things you probably get- you expect with bright young men in places like Oxford and Cambridge. I mean there are bright people who are perfectly normal and well adjusted but they don’t always give that impression, I mean many of them. Was it all good fun- Well, yes, it was, except I had to work for a Ph.D. remember. That was- that was interesting but was less fun, I would say. Yes talking to Jim was always fun and of course, the protein structure work was interesting too. One shouldn't- shouldn’t play that down but… you must remember when we were interested in DNA we didn’t know the structure was going to turn out to be so significant. In fact, Jim said we used to wonder whether it was going to be rather dull and all right, well we get the structure, what's it going to tell you, you see. Fortunately it wasn’t like that.
Title: James Watson (Part 2)
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, 51 seconds
Date story recorded/uploaded:
1993
Date story went live:
24 January 2008
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