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Schooldays

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Being taught sciences at school
Francis Crick Scientist
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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, they… 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… 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… and so on. So, I don’t… 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 [Bachelor of Medicine] in… at… 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.

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.

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.

Tags: World War II, Bachelor of Medicine

Duration: 1 minute, 27 seconds

Date story recorded: 1993

Date story went live: 08 January 2010