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 it gives a reasonable impression but I don’t think it addresses very well how we interacted together because to do that you have to make- give it really some life. You have to go into the technical details which you can’t do into a thing like 'Life Story' so you get a rather superficially impression, you know. We just talked a bit here and there but in fact it wasn’t like that. It was a lot of detailed arguments, some of which were quite off centre which, looking back, we can see were irrelevant and some of which were very elaborate or fairly elaborate, I wouldn’t say very elaborate, fairly elaborate. And it’s- it's that level of discussion that’s important, to get down to the nitty-gritty and argue, you know, well this experiment shows this in this detail or could it've been a mistake or what could have gone wrong there and should we ignore that and so on. It gets really quite- and it’s very demanding, in other words you usually go on for hours and you wouldn’t go on for hours unless you were very interested in the topic. You can easily exhaust somebody who isn’t interested if you talk to them about it. So you have to have two people who are both very interested in some topic and then they collaborate very closely so I don’t think that 'Life Story' got that over so well. It just showed there was a collaboration and we had some mutual interests and there were one or two exchanges but it didn’t show the depth of what we were doing.
Title: "Life Story"
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, 23 seconds
Date story recorded/uploaded:
1993
Date story went live:
24 January 2008
Embed code
Comment
Leave a comment