Francis Crick

Francis Crick was born on 8 June 1916 in Northampton, England, and died on 28 July 2004 in San Diego, California. Educated at University College London, he worked during the Second World War on the design of magnetic mines for the Royal Navy before moving into biology. From 1949 to 1977 he worked at Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory, where with James Watson, and using X-ray diffraction evidence that reached them through Rosalind Franklin's colleague Maurice Wilkins, detailed on this atlas's own Photograph 51 entry, he published the DNA double helix model in Nature in April 1953. He shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Watson and Wilkins, then continued work at Cambridge helping determine which triplets of DNA bases, or codons, correspond to which amino acids in a protein. From 1977 until his death Crick was a distinguished professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, where his research turned to the neurological basis of consciousness.