Francis harry compton creek - biography. Crick Francis Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids

Prof. Duluman E.K.

Nobel laureate Francis Crick and atheism

(Before the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA)

if revealed religions

have anything revealed

it is that they

are usually wrong.

(If the religions of Revelation ,

open up something

then these revelations are usually

turn out to be false)

Francis Creek

Francis Creek

In 2003, the world scientific community celebrated the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the DNA structure. The Russian Academy of Sciences devoted the entire sixth issue of the "BULLETIN OF THE RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES" for 2003 to this significant event, festively calling it: ON THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DISCOVERY OF THE STRUCTURE OF DNA.

Our leading and world-famous academicians made detailed analytical and informational articles: L.L. Kiselev,"Jubilee of the most important molecule"; E. D. Sverdlov,"The Great Discovery: Revolution, Canonization, Dogma and Heresy"; V. L. Karpov,"DNA, chromatin, histone code". By "clicking" on the title of these articles, you will get the opportunity to get acquainted with the full texts of their authors.

Academician L.L. Kiselev writes:

Watson and Crick were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962 for their discovery of the structure of DNA.

After reading the articles in the Academic Bulletin, I remembered the atheistic articles I had read earlier and the sayings of Francis Harry Compton Crick ( Francis Harry Compton Crick and his biography under the intriguing, if not strange, title: What Mad Pursuit», which can be translated as " What is crazy looking for?". It can also be translated differently, since the word “mad” can mean both “biased”, and “selfless”, and “in love”, and “crazy”, and the word “Pursuit” can mean “pursue”, “persuade”, “stay in search." However, when reading Crick's autobiography, one gets the impression that he used the word "mad" in response to the Biblical charge of insanity against an atheist: "A fool speaks in his heart: there is no God" (Psalm 13:1; 52:2). At this point, English translations of the Bible refer to the madman as "mad."

In the autobiography What Mad Pursuit» there is a special chapter that Crick called: "How I Got Inclined Towards Atheism" ("Why I leaned towards atheism"). We do not have the opportunity to retell all the interesting and unique thoughts of the great scientist about the atheistic and religious worldview. We will give only three most representative, in our opinion, quotes from this greatest scientist and staunch atheist ..

« The mere knowledge of the true age of the earth, as convincingly evidenced by geological deposits, fossils of plants and animals, does not allow the intelligent mind to believe literally, like religious fundamentalists, in everything that is written in the Bible. And if some statements of the Bible are clearly false, then on the basis of what other biblical stories should be accepted as true?»

« Christian religious beliefs at the time of their formation may have responded not only to the imagination of believers, but also to the level of knowledge of that era. But, as unfortunate as it may be, subsequent scientific discoveries not only decisively refuted Christian beliefs, but also put them in an unsightly light. What could be more stupid than to justify the way of life of modern man entirely with erroneous ideas only on the basis that they, these ideas, were once considered true? And what could be more important than finding one's true place in the universe, eliminating one by one these vicious remnants of earlier beliefs? But it is still clear that a number of mysteries are still waiting for their scientific explanation. As long as they are not explained, they can harbor all sorts of religious superstitions.

For me, a matter of paramount importance was the desire to identify as yet ununderstood areas of knowledge in biology, to achieve their true scientific understanding. Only in this way could religious beliefs be confirmed or refuted.».

* * *

« The astonishing hypothesis is that your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of self and free will are all in fact nothing more than the activity of a vast complex of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice would put it, you're just a bag of neurons. ».

The "Revelations of Revelation" are Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which believe that the content of their beliefs is Revealed to them by God in the text of the Bible...

(English) FrancisCrick was born, June 8 in Northampton, England; died at age 88

English physicist (by education), Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1962 (together with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins) with the wording: "for their discovery of the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance in the transmission of information in living matter."

During World War II, he worked at the Admiralty, where he developed magnetic and acoustic mines for the British fleet.

In 1946 Francis Creek read a book Erwin Schrödinger: What is life in terms of physics? and decided to leave research in the field of physics and take up problems of biology. He later wrote that in order to move from physics to biology, one must "almost be born again."

In 1947 Francis Creek left the Admiralty, and at about the same time Linus Pauling hypothesized that the diffraction pattern of proteins was determined by alpha helices wrapped one around the other.

Francis Crick was interested in two fundamental unsolved problems in biology:
- How do molecules allow the transition from non-living to living?
How does the brain think?

In 1951 Francis Creek met with James Watson and together they turned in 1953 to the analysis of the structure of DNA.

"Career F. Crick can not be called fast and bright. At thirty-five he is still not received PhD status (PhD roughly corresponds to the title of candidate of science - Note by I.L. Vikentiev).
German bombs destroyed a laboratory in London where he was supposed to measure the viscosity of hot water under pressure.
Crick was not very upset that his career in physics had come to a standstill. He had previously been attracted to biology, so he quickly found a job in Cambridge, where his topic was the measurement of the viscosity of the cytoplasm of cells. In addition, he studied crystallography at the Cavendish.
But Crick did not have the patience to successfully develop his own scientific ideas, nor the due diligence to develop others. His constant mockery of others, disdain for his own career, combined with self-confidence and a habit of giving advice to others, irritated his Cavendish colleagues.
But Crick himself was not enthusiastic about the scientific focus of the laboratory, which concentrated exclusively on proteins. He was sure that the search was going in the wrong direction. The secret of genes lies not in proteins, but in DNA. Seduced by ideas Watson, he abandoned his own research and focused on the study of the DNA molecule.
Thus was born the great duo of two friendly rival talents: a young, ambitious American with a little bit of biology, and a bright-minded but unassembled thirty-five-year-old Briton with a background in physics.
The combination of two opposites caused an exothermic reaction.
Within a few months, having put together their own and previously obtained by others, but not processed data, two scientists came close to the greatest discovery in the entire history of mankind - deciphering the structure of DNA. […]
But there was no mistake.
Everything turned out to be extremely simple: DNA contains a code written along its entire molecule - an elegantly elongated double helix that can be arbitrarily long.
The code is copied due to the chemical affinity between the constituent chemical compounds - the letters of the code. The combinations of letters represent the text of the recipe for the protein molecule, written in an unknown code. The simplicity and elegance of the structure of DNA was stunning.
Later Richard Dawkins wrote: “What was really revolutionary in the era of molecular biology that came after the discovery of Watson and Crick was that the code of life was written down in digital form, incredibly similar to the code of a computer program.”

Matt Ridley, Genome: autobiography of a species in 23 chapters, M., Eksmo, 2009, pp.69-71.

After analyzing the received Maurice Wilkins data on X-ray scattering on DNA crystals, Francis Creek together with James Watson built in 1953 a model of the three-dimensional structure of this molecule, called the Watson-Crick Model.

Francis Creek wrote to his son in 1953 proudly: “ Jim Watson and I made perhaps the most important discovery... Now we are sure that DNA is a code. Thus, the sequence of bases (“letters”) makes one gene different from another (just as different pages of printed text differ from one another). You can imagine how Nature makes copies of genes: if two chains are untwisted into two separate chains, F each chain attaches another chain, then A will always be with T, and G with C, and we will get two copies instead of one. In other words, we think we have found the underlying mechanism by which life emerges from life... You can understand how excited we are.”

Quoted in Matt Ridley, Life is a Discrete Code, in: The Theories of Everything, ed. John Brockman, M., "Bean"; "Laboratory of Knowledge", 2016, p. eleven.

Exactly Francis Creek in 1958 "... with formulated the "central dogma of molecular biology", according to which the transmission of hereditary information goes only in one direction, namely from DNA to RNA and from RNA to protein .
Its meaning is that the genetic information recorded in DNA is realized in the form of proteins, but not directly, but with the help of a related polymer - ribonucleic acid (RNA), and this path from nucleic acids to proteins is irreversible. Thus, DNA is synthesized on DNA, providing its own reduplication, i.e. reproduction of the original genetic material in generations. RNA is also synthesized on DNA, resulting in the rewriting (transcription) of genetic information into the form of multiple copies of RNA. RNA molecules serve as templates for protein synthesis - genetic information is translated into the form of polypeptide chains.

Gnatik E.N., Man and his prospects in the light of anthropogenetics: a philosophical analysis, M., Publishing house of the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia, 2005, p. 71.

“In 1994, a book that caused a wide resonance was published Francis Crick“An amazing hypothesis. Scientific search for the soul.
Crick is skeptical about philosophers and philosophy in general, considering their abstract reasoning unfruitful. Received the Nobel Prize for deciphering DNA (together with J. Watson and M. Wilkins), he set himself the following task: to decipher the nature of consciousness on the basis of specific facts of the brain.
By and large, he is not concerned with the question “what is consciousness?”, But how the brain produces it.
He says, "'You', your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are really nothing more than the behavior of a vast community of nerve cells and their interacting molecules."
Most of all, Crick is interested in the question: what is the nature of the structures and patterns that ensure the connection and unity of a conscious act (“the binding problem”)?
Why are very different stimuli received by the brain connected in such a way that they eventually produce a unified experience, for example, the image of a walking cat?
It is in the nature of the connections of the brain, he believes, that one should look for an explanation of the phenomenon of consciousness.
The “surprising hypothesis”, in fact, is that the key to understanding the nature of consciousness and its qualitative images may be the synchronized bursts of neurons recorded in experiments in the range from 35 before 40 Hertz in the networks connecting the thalamus with the cerebral cortex.
Naturally, both philosophers and cognitive scientists doubted that from the fluctuation of nerve fibers, perhaps really associated with the manifestation of phenomenal features of experience, it is possible to build hypotheses about consciousness and its cognitive thought processes.

Yudina N.S., Consciousness, physicalism, science, in Sat.: The problem of consciousness in philosophy and science / Ed. DI. Dubrovsky, M., "Canon +", 2009, p.93.

Francis Harry Compton Creek, the first child of Harry Creek and Annie Elizabeth Wilkins, was born on June 8, 1916, in a small settlement near Northamptonshire, England (Northamptonshire, England). His grandfather, amateur naturalist Walter Drawbridge Crick, compiled reports on the study of local foraminifera and corresponded with Charles Darwin (Charles Darwin). In honor of his grandfather, two representatives of the gastropod class were even named.

At an early age, Francis became interested in science and actively drew knowledge from books. His parents took him to church, but closer to the age of 12, the boy announced that he was abandoning his religious faith in order to search for answers to his questions from a scientific point of view. Later, he said with a bit of irony that adults can discuss Christian issues for as long as possible, but children should be kept away from all this.

At 21, Crick earned a bachelor's degree in physics from University College London (University College London). During World War II, he ended up at the Admiralty Research Laboratory, where he developed magnetic and acoustic mines and played an important role in the creation of a new mine that proved effective against German minesweepers.

In 1947, Crick began studying biology, joining a stream of "migrant scientists" who were leaving their physics studies in favor of biology. He had to switch from the "elegance and profound simplicity" of physics to "complex chemical processes developed by natural selection over billions of years." Emphasizing the seriousness of the transition from one area to another, Crick said that he was "practically born again."

For most of the next two years, Francis spent most of his time studying the physical properties of the cytoplasm at the Cambridge Strangeways Laboratory, headed by Honor Bridget Fell, until he began collaborating with Max Perutz and John Kendrew. ) at the Cavendish Laboratory. In late 1951, Crick worked with James Watson, with whom he published a joint model for the helical structure of DNA in 1953.

Maurice Wilkins was also involved in the discovery of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid. He showed Francis and James an X-ray of a DNA molecule taken by his collaborator Rosalind Franklin, and after that, scientists were able to explain the mechanisms of DNA copying. In molecular biology, Crick introduced the term "Central dogma", generalizing the rule for the implementation of genetic information (DNA → RNA → protein).

For the remainder of his career, Crick served as professor at the John Salk Institute for Biological Research in La Jolla, California. Its functions were limited only to research work. Francis's later research has focused on theoretical neuroscience and is linked to his desire to advance the study of human consciousness.

Francis has been married twice. He had three children and six grandchildren. He died of colon cancer on July 28, 2004.

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James Dewey Watson - American molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist; He is best known for his participation in the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

After successfully graduating from the University of Chicago and Indiana University, Watson spent some time doing research in chemistry with biochemist Herman Kalckar in Copenhagen. He later moved to the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, where he first met his future colleague and comrade Francis Crick.

Watson and Crick came up with the idea of ​​the DNA double helix in mid-March 1953 while studying experimental data collected by Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. The discovery was announced by Sir Lawrence Bragg, director of the Cavendish Laboratory; this happened at a Belgian scientific conference on April 8, 1953. An important statement, however, the press actually did not notice. On April 25, 1953, an article about the discovery was published in the scientific journal Nature. Other biologists and a number of Nobel laureates quickly appreciated the monumental nature of the discovery; some even called it the greatest scientific discovery of the 20th century.

In 1962, Watson, Crick and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery. The fourth participant in the project, Rosalind Franklin, died in 1958 and, as a result, could no longer claim the prize. Watson also received a monument at the American Museum of Natural History in New York for his discovery; since such monuments are erected only in honor of American scientists, Crick and Wilkins were left without monuments.

Watson is to this day considered one of the greatest scientists in history; however, as a person, many openly disliked him. James Watson has been the subject of quite high-profile scandals several times; one of them was directly related to his work - the fact is that in the course of working on the DNA model, Watson and Crick used the data obtained by Rosalind Franklin, without her permission. With Franklin's partner, Wilkins, scientists worked quite actively; Rosalind herself, quite possibly, could not have known until the end of her life how important the role her experiments played in understanding the structure of DNA.

From 1956 to 1976, Watson worked at the Harvard Biology Department; During this period, he was mainly interested in molecular biology.

In 1968, Watson received a director's position at the Cold Spring Harbor laboratory in Long Island, New York (Long Island, New York); through his efforts, the level of quality of research work in the laboratory has considerably risen, and funding has improved markedly. Watson himself during this period was mainly engaged in cancer research; along the way, he made the laboratory subject to him one of the best centers for molecular biology in the world.

In 1994, Watson became president of the research center, in 2004 - rector; in 2007, he left his position after rather unpopular statements about the existence of a connection between the level of intelligence and origin.

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The English molecular biologist Francis Harry Compton Crick was born in Northampton, the elder of two sons of Harry Compton Crick, a wealthy shoe manufacturer, and Anna Elizabeth (Wilkins) Crick. After spending his childhood in Northampton, he attended a high school. During the economic crisis that followed the First World War, the family's commercial affairs fell into disrepair, and Crick's parents moved to London. As a student at Mill Hill School, Crick showed great interest in physics, chemistry and mathematics. In 1934 he entered University College London to study physics and graduated three years later with a Bachelor of Science degree. Completing his education at University College, Crick considered the viscosity of water at high temperatures; this work was interrupted in 1939 by the outbreak of World War II.

During the war years, K. engaged in the creation of mines in the research laboratory of the Naval Ministry of Great Britain. For two years after the end of the war, he continued to work in this ministry and it was then that he read Erwin Schrödinger's famous book What is Life? Physical Aspects of the Living Cell” (“What Is Life? The Physical Aspects of the Living Cell”), published in 1944. In the book, Schrödinger asks the question: “How can spatiotemporal events occurring in a living organism be explained from the position physics and chemistry?

The ideas presented in the book, so influenced K. that he, intending to do particle physics, switched to biology. With the support of Archibald W. Hill K. received a scholarship from the Council for Medical Research and in 1947. began working at the Strangeway Laboratory in Cambridge. Here he studied biology, organic chemistry, and X-ray diffraction techniques used to determine the spatial structure of molecules. His knowledge of biology expanded significantly after moving in 1949 to the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, one of the world's centers of molecular biology.

Under the leadership of Max Perutz K. investigated the molecular structure of proteins, in connection with which he had an interest in the genetic code of the amino acid sequence in protein molecules. Studying what he defined as "the boundary between living and non-living", Crick tried to find the chemical basis of genetics, which, as he suggested, could be laid down in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).

When K. began working on his doctoral dissertation at Cambridge, it was already known that nucleic acids consist of DNA and RNA (ribonucleic acid), each of which is formed by molecules of the monosaccharide group of pentoses (deoxyribose or ribose), phosphate and four nitrogenous bases - adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine (RNA contains uracil instead of thymine). In 1950, Erwin Chargaff of Columbia University showed that DNA contains equal amounts of these nitrogenous bases. Maurice H.F. Wilkins and his colleague Rosalind Franklin of King's College London conducted X-ray diffraction studies of DNA molecules and concluded that DNA has the shape of a double helix, resembling a spiral staircase.

In 1951, the twenty-three-year-old American biologist James D. Watson invited K. to work at the Cavendish Laboratory. Subsequently, they established close creative contacts. Based on the early studies of Chargaff, Wilkins and Franklin, K. and Watson set out to determine the chemical structure of DNA. Within two years, they developed the spatial structure of the DNA molecule by constructing its model from balls, pieces of wire and cardboard. According to their model, DNA is a double helix consisting of two chains of monosaccharide and phosphate (deoxyribose phosphate) connected by base pairs within the helix, with adenine connected to thymine, and guanine to cytosine, and the bases to each other by hydrogen bonds.

Nobel laureates Watson and Crick

The model allowed other researchers to visualize DNA replication clearly. The two strands of the molecule are separated at the sites of hydrogen bonds, like opening a zipper, after which a new one is synthesized on each half of the old DNA molecule. The base sequence acts as a template, or blueprint, for the new molecule.

In 1953, Mr.. K. and Watson completed the creation of a DNA model. In the same year, K. received his Ph.D. from Cambridge, defending his thesis on X-ray diffraction analysis of protein structure. Over the next year, he studied protein structure at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute in New York and lectured at various US universities. Returning to Cambridge in 1954, he continued his research at the Cavendish Laboratory, concentrating on deciphering the genetic code. Originally a theoretician, K. began with Sydney Brenner to study genetic mutations in bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacterial cells).

By 1961, three types of RNA were discovered: messenger, ribosomal, and transport. K. and his colleagues proposed a way to read the genetic code. According to K.'s theory, messenger RNA receives genetic information from DNA in the cell nucleus and transfers it to ribosomes (sites of protein synthesis) in the cell's cytoplasm. Transfer RNA carries amino acids into ribosomes.

Informational and ribosomal RNA, interacting with each other, provide a combination of amino acids to form protein molecules in the correct sequence. The genetic code is made up of triplets of nitrogenous bases of DNA and RNA for each of the 20 amino acids. Genes consist of numerous basic triplets, which K. called codons; codons are the same in different species.

K., Wilkins and Watson shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and their importance for the transmission of information in living systems." A.V. Engström of the Karolinska Institute said at the awards ceremony: "The discovery of the spatial molecular structure ... DNA is extremely important, because it outlines the possibilities for understanding in great detail the general and individual characteristics of all living things." Engström noted that "deciphering the double helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid with a specific pairing of nitrogenous bases opens up fantastic opportunities for unraveling the details of the control and transmission of genetic information."

In the year of receiving the Nobel Prize K. became head of the biological laboratory at the University of Cambridge and a foreign member of the Council of the Salk Institute in San Diego (California). In 1977, he moved to San Diego, having received an invitation to become a professor. At the Salkovsky Institute K. conducted research in the field of neurobiology, in particular, studied the mechanisms of vision and dreams. In 1983, together with the English mathematician Graham Mitchison, he proposed that dreams are a side effect of the process by which the human brain is freed from excessive or useless associations accumulated during wakefulness. Scientists have hypothesized that this form of "reverse learning" exists to prevent neural overload.

In the book "Life as it is: its origin and nature" ("Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature", 1981) K. noted the amazing similarity of all forms of life. "With the exception of mitochondria," he wrote, "the genetic code is identical in all living things currently studied." Referring to discoveries in molecular biology, paleontology and cosmology, he suggested that life on Earth could have originated from microorganisms that were scattered throughout space from another planet; this theory he and his colleague Leslie Orgel called "immediate panspermia".

In 1940, Mr.. K. married Ruth Doreen Dodd; they had a son. They divorced in 1947, and two years later K. married Odile Speed. They had two daughters.

Numerous awards K. include the Charles Leopold Mayer Prize of the French Academy of Sciences (1961), the American Research Society Scientific Prize (1962), the Royal Medal (1972), the Royal Society Copley Medal (1976). K. - Honorary Member of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Irish Academy, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the US National Academy of Sciences.