SAN DIEGO – Nobel Prize-winning scientist Francis Crick, who co-discovered the spiral, double-helix structure of DNA in 1953 and opened the way for everything from gene-spliced crops and medicines to DNA fingerprinting and the genetic detection of diseases, has died. He was 88.
Crick died Wednesday following a battle with colon cancer, according to the Salk Institute, the research body where Crick worked in recent years.
The British-born Crick was 36 and working at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory in 1953 when he and American-born James Watson, just 24, struck upon the idea that the DNA molecule resembled a twisted ladder.
After making the discovery, Crick walked into a Cambridge pub and announced that he and Watson had “found the secret of life.” But only a few people at the time “even thought it was interesting,” Crick once said, and it took years before the groundbreaking discovery was accepted.
Decades later, the discovery’s impact can be seen everywhere. It laid the foundation for the biotechnology industry, enabling scientists to engineer bigger tomatoes, doctors to pursue gene therapy to treat disease, and police to solve crimes through DNA evidence.
Crick and Watson were awarded the Nobel in medicine in 1962.
In a statement Thursday, Watson hailed Crick “for his extraordinarily focused intelligence and for the many ways he showed me kindness and developed my self-confidence.”
In person, Crick was provocative, quick-witted and charming, though he rarely consented to interviews. He was averse to attention of any sort, he said, not because he was anti-social but because it cut into his thinking time.
Unlike many scientists, Crick did not spend his days toiling in a lab or instructing students. Instead, he read and mused in his Salk Institute office overlooking the Pacific Ocean, putting in full days well beyond retirement age. He came to Salk after resigning from the Cambridge faculty in 1977.
Francis Harry Compton Crick was born in Northampton, England, in 1916 to a shoe factory owner and his wife, who bought their young son a children’s encyclopedia to help answer his many science questions. He studied physics at University College of London and then built underwater mines for the British government during World War II.
After the war, Crick became interested in “the division between the living and the nonliving” and decided to teach himself biology and chemistry.
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