Francis Crick

Francis Harry Compton Crick was born 8 June 1916 in England and trained as a molecular biologist and biophysicist. He and James Watson published their Nature paper on DNA's helical structure in 1953, work built on crucial contributions from Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. The four deciphered the molecule's architecture; Crick, Watson, and Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for it. Crick coined "central dogma" to describe the one-way flow of genetic information from nucleic acids to proteins - irreversible at the final step. He spent his later decades as J.W. Kieckhefer Distinguished Research Professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, chasing a harder problem: the scientific basis of human consciousness. He was editing a manuscript on his deathbed when he died 28 July 2004, a scientist to the end.