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 was brought up on the edge of the countryside you know, growing suburb. It was on the edge of the countryside so I would sort of see frogs' eggs in ponds and various things and my first prize I ever got was for collecting wild flowers because all the other kids lived in the town so of course I had a very unfair advantage. But I don’t know that I was particularly asked scientific questions, it isn’t very easy to ask scientific questions about flowers. They’re more a matter of observation, you know, this is different from that and so on rather than the underlying, say, chemistry of the pigments or something of that sort which make the colours. And I’m not even sure I had a very clear idea when I was a boy as to what made compounds coloured, for example, because I remember after the war going and actually reading up about the different sorts of ways that they, different organic and organic compounds absorb light and therefore were coloured and so on. So I don’t think- I don't think I was specially interested in biology and when I was at school it was mainly chemistry and physics and I don’t think, although there was some biological teaching going on it was for the first year medical students. I was at a school where you could take what’s called your first MB in your last year at school which my brother did so there was some teaching like that going on but I don’t think there was much emphasis on biology as such.
Title: Developing an interest in the sciences
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, 27 seconds
Date story recorded/uploaded:
1993
Date story went live:
08 January 2010
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