josh hayes

Francis Crick passes away at age 88.

http://www.cbc.ca/cp/world/040729/w072972.html

A sad, but not unexpected, day.

-JAH

perplexed in peoria

"No one man discovered or created molecular biology.
But one man dominates intellectually the whole field,
because he knows the most and understands the most.
Francis Crick."
- Jacques Monod, quoted by H.F. Judson in "The Eighth
Day of Creation"

Crick's Nobel lecture:
http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1962/crick-lecture.html
presented at the height of the excitement over the genetic code,
provides a fairly good example of how theoretical concepts that
Crick generated interacted with the experimental results produced
by others. Judson's book provides additional examples. Crick's
influence was not always helpful, though. In fact, our slowness in
noticing ribozymes, introns, and snoRNA can be blamed, in part,
on over-reliance on Crick's models. Crick-style model construction
can be very useful as a guide for discovery experimentation, but
we should never forget that models can also be useful as a source
of ideas for paradigm-overthrow experiments. Francis Crick would
certainly approve of this use of his ideas.

tomhendricks474

<< Francis Crick passes away at age 88.

http://www.cbc.ca/cp/world/040729/w072972.html

A sad, but not unexpected, day.

-JAH


His was a life of impressive achievement.

malcolm

One of the most impressive things is that he could have dined off DNA for
the rest of his life. But he didn't - he did a lot of work on the genetic
code, and then he spent the last part of his life working on consciousness.
Cracking consciousness as well as the gene is too much to expect of any man,
but he gave it his best.

anthony cerrato

Indeed, we have lost one of the giants. It is hard to
believe that it is over 50 years now that the genetic
revolution began with the structure of DNA by Watson and
Crick. (I was just graduating high school!) The progress of
biology in these 50 years has been unbelievable however, and
we truly live in a completely different world because of
these pioneers. We all owe them a great debt which only
grows with time. ...tonyC