The life and times of Francis Crick | 91TV
Transcript
- David Baulcombe: So good evening everybody. My name is David Baulcombe,
- I'm the biological secretary of the Royal Society, and it's my pleasure to welcome you
- here to Carlton House Terrace this evening to listen to the Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Lecture.
- Before we start, I should tell you that the lecture is being live-streamed, so this means that
- we have to be on our best behaviour this evening. Also the benefit is you'll be able to listen again
- to Matthew after the event. So something to look forward to. Just a couple of normal housekeeping
- things, phones off please, and if there's a fire alarm it's the same as on a plane, you go back
- through economy class and then out at the back there, and then you leave through the fire exit.
- So we're here this evening to present the 2024 Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Lecture to Matthew Cobb.
- The medal is awarded for excellence representing social function, philosophy or history of science.
- Matthew is certainly very well-qualified to receive an award under those headings,
- particularly the history of science. Previous recipients include Philip Ball,
- Jim Al-Khalili, Melvyn Bragg and Simon Schaffer. So Matthew is quite rightly joining an eminent
- list of previous recipients of the medal. Matthew is presently Emeritus Professor of Zoology at the
- University of Manchester. He is known for his popular science books The Egg and Sperm Race,
- The 17th Century Scientists who Unravelled the Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth,
- Life's Greatest Secret, The Race to Crack the Genetic Code and The Idea of the Brain: A History.
- He's currently just finishing a biography of Francis Crick and that, I understand is due to
- appear in November 2025. So bad timing of this lecture, Matthew. Had it been a little earlier,
- you could have had a pile of signed copies for us all to purchase at the back there. Anyway,
- something for us to look forward to. So it's my pleasure and privilege to welcome to the stage to
- present the Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar lecture, Professor Matthew Cobb.
- Matthew Cobb: Hello, everybody. So thank you to all of you for coming out on a very hot
- evening. When you would probably rather be sitting at a riverside pub, maybe you can go and do that
- afterwards. I've also got a set of thanks that I'm afraid I'm going to have to read out, because
- otherwise I'll forget people and I don't want to. So firstly, obviously to the Royal Society,
- not only for this award but in fact for changing my life, because in 1984 they gave me a grant to
- go and work in France and this changed my life. My children were born in France, my wife I met in
- France and then later they kickstarted this work by giving me a grant to, or to work on Francis
- Crick and Sydney Brenner, his close friend, which was also supported by Cold Spring Harbor.
- I want to thank Philip Ball and Adam Rutherford for nominating me and various
- bosses at the University of Manchester down the decades, including Alan Moore, Terry Brown,
- Martin Humphries and Simon Hubbard, all of whom, proper biologists, and yet were very tolerant
- of me spending time looking a bit less at maggot noses, which is what I was supposed to be doing,
- and a bit more about history. Also therefore, colleagues at the centre for the History of
- Science, Technology and Medicine in Manchester in particular the late John Pickstone,
- who was enormously influential, and the current head, Carsten Timmermann.
- A lot of my work has also been done on radio, and so I want to thank the people from the BBC
- Radio Science Unit, some of whom are here tonight, Roland Pease, who gave me my first break, Deborah
- Cohen, who is head of the unit, and Sasha Feachem, and also the ace producer, Andrew Luck-Baker, who
- without whom I would not have been able to produce the radio programmes I did. I want to thank my
- publishers, in particular the founder of Profile Books, Andrew Franklin, cousin of Rosalind,
- who isn't here because he's on a pilgrimage at the moment. My editors, the late John Davie,
- then Ed Lake and now Nick Humphrey, and my agent for the past 20 years, Peter Tallack. Again,
- their work was incredibly important. The work on Crick was made possible
- by the support of his family, Gabrielle, Michael and Kindra Crick, and by his colleagues and
- friends in particular, Mark Bretscher and Peter Lawrence, both of whom I hope are
- watching out on the internet. Finally, the help and friendship from Luis Campos of Rice University
- and Nathaniel Comfort of Johns Hopkins, who is currently writing a biography of Watson,
- has been really important to me. Finally, of course, there's the support, tolerance
- and love of my family in particular, Tina. So what I'm going to do today. Now, normally,
- I walk around the stage. I don't like being kind of… But the camera won't see me,
- so I'm going to have to stay here and just talk to you like a proper lecturer. For the last
- three-and-a-half years, I've been trying to get my head around the life and times of Francis Crick,
- who obviously co-discovered the DNA double helix. I first really got to grips with his work when I
- was writing my book, Life's Greatest Secret, which was shortlisted by the Royal Society. I
- was quite amazed by quite how astonishingly clever he was. Then when I was writing my book about the
- history of the brain, my impression because he switched to work on neuroscience in the second
- half of his life, my impression had been that all this had come to nothing. He kept on popping up
- and reading these articles and people's letters and so on. He played an absolutely vital role.
- This led me to start to kind of scratch my head and think, well, how on earth was he able to do
- this? How could he do that? How could he think all these and imagine all those things? Now I ended
- up deciding to write a biography of him. Now I'm not going to give a biographical lecture today,
- partly because, as you heard, the terms of the lecture are quite highfalutin philosophy
- and social function and history. So talking simply about an individual doesn't entirely
- fit that mode. I thought I would talk about his life but also raise the more general issue
- slightly philosophical of does it matter who does science. So I'm going to talk primarily about
- Crick, but also a little bit about how science works and how Crick’s science worked and when it
- was important and when it perhaps was less so. Now you probably know that you know that… You
- know that Crick co-discovered the double helix and you know, there's an institute in London
- which is headed by Sir Paul Nurse, who's also the incoming president of the Royal Society. But
- Crick’s reputation was really quite extraordinary. So in 1994 he published this book, The Astonishing
- Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. There's not much of the soul in it. That was just
- a hook to sell books, and the publication of this book in 1994, which is basically a materialist
- account of consciousness. It tries to give some ideas of how it might work, and it just says,
- well, there's nothing mystical about our consciousness. It's the activity of neurones.
- That's what is astonishing. Your mileage may differ. You may or may not find that astonishing.
- The publication of it led to a huge media brouhaha. There were editorials in The Times
- and Nature about the publication of the book. He gave a sellout lecture in Westminster Hall.
- The book topped the best seller list. He was on Radio Four’s Start the Week with Salman Rushdie,
- Tom Stoppard, Maya Angelou interviewed by Melvyn Bragg and Brenda Maddox,
- who went on to write the biography of Rosalind Franklin. So quite an astonishing
- gang who was there. They all had something to sell, a book to sell or a play to publicise.
- They ended up all of them talking about Crick's book, and I've been able to listen to the to the
- to the programme. BBC should put it on their on the iPlayer and it is really quite extraordinary.
- The Times had quite amazing comparisons of Crick. This article by Lewis Wolpert, the famed science
- journalist, compares, 'One cannot easily characterise Crick's skills any more than
- one can those of Mozart or Shakespeare,' and then goes on to basically compare him with Newton for
- his way of thinking. Now this all seems a bit overblown these days, because we're not really
- on that kind of view of scientists as individuals, and as you know, having an almost hagiography that
- is a saint, a view of him, somebody as a saint. We recognise that individual contributions,
- in particular in modern science, are much less easy to kind of determine. You can't imagine a
- current day scientist rather than a science communicator like Attenborough or Brian Cox,
- getting that kind of response from the media. I can't think of anybody who's alive today who
- would capture the imagination in that kind of way. Also scientific biographies had kind of gone out
- of fashion amongst historians who are much more interested in the kind of social and philosophical
- factors that the other parts of the medal, the lecture are about. I think that's to kind of
- miss the point because individuals are important in some ways and they can also inspire people,
- in particular when they come from underrepresented groups. Now clearly Crick as an old white man
- from the UK did not… Was not under any kind of underrepresented group. Nonetheless, his work,
- I think, can be quite inspiring in terms of seeing how he did it. Not so much what he did,
- but how he did it. So that's why I'm asking that second question does it matter who does science.
- Now Crick had quite clear views of this in around the millennium. Wedgwood, Wedgwood Pottery wanted
- to reproduce his image, his portrait on a plate to celebrate great British inventions of the
- millennium. Crick generally did not like his picture being taken and was quite a private,
- individual and so he refused. Then, eventually, they produced this rather fine plate,
- as you can see with the not entirely anatomically correct double helix at the top. He wrote to them,
- 'Thank you so much for your very handsome plate. I think it better to put symbols rather than faces,
- and discoveries and inventions are more important than the people who make them.' That's clearly
- true because it's the discoveries and the scientific framework and the ideas that
- enable us to proceed. But individuals, I think, nonetheless do have a role.
- The reason why he's arguing that they're very subordinate, is that science is a
- weird mixture of chance and necessity, unlike say, Mozart or Shakespeare, which are also,
- although they're also collective and they take place in a social context, you can quite clearly
- see the role of the individual. Most science is incremental. So most of the science that I did,
- to be honest, it didn't really matter. Somebody else might have done it or not. It had no massive
- effect. It was a tiny little contribution. Some major discoveries are extremely likely.
- In fact, you can argue that they're almost inevitable, whereas others, like penicillin,
- do indeed have a major role of chance. If Alexander Fleming hadn't left that plate out,
- then it would have taken a lot longer to discover antibiotics. I think I'm going
- to show that individuals, despite this, what a philosopher would say was overdetermined nature
- of science. That is, it's almost inevitable that something's going to be discovered at a particular
- moment with a particular set of techniques. Individuals can alter the course of events by
- their insights and their interests. I think it's also to reiterate this that diversity of approach,
- gender, ethnicity, nationality and class can help scientists function better because it
- reduces groupthink. You've got different approaches to the same problem simply from
- different life experiences and different ways of thinking. That can open new ways of thinking about
- science. That's why I think that the various aims at diversity, which have really taken
- off in science, are extremely important. Sadly, not everybody thinks the same way.
- As we know, Elon Musk, who still unfortunately a member of the Royal Society, a fellow of the Royal
- Society, has been powering through attacks on US science, which are not only reducing the amount of
- funding, but they're also targeted in particular at those aspects of diversity. I think this is
- going to have a catastrophic consequence for US science and world science, partly because the work
- is not going to be done. Work on mRNA vaccines has been cut, for example, but also because that
- diversity of the workforce which was being created is going to take a huge step back. That's it for
- Musk. If you want to know more, then there's two people. There's Andrew [?Seller 0:18:33.2] and
- Stephen Curry who you can talk to afterwards, who can talk to you about that.
- Crick's life was very much a career of two halves. So we've got the first one on molecular biology,
- and the second on neuroscience, and both of them, as I said, this is why I got very intrigued by
- him, changed how science was done. First molecular genetics was about 17 years from 1953 onwards,
- and then neuroscience. So I'm going to talk about these two halves and show you the kind
- of things that he did, and things that nobody else was able to do and changed the way that we
- thought and the way that we tried to do science. So here we are in 1953. This is a very famous
- picture taken in Room 103 of the Cavendish Wing. It's still there, the Cavendish Wing.
- There's same bricks on the wall. You can see behind, there's the picture of the double helix,
- which is drawn by Crick's wife, Odile, who was a very talented artist though as Crick said,
- 'It's very sad that her best known work of art has absolutely nothing to do with most of her style,'
- and this is a very good scientific representation. Now, about ten years ago, I asked Jim Watson.
- I said to him, what was the most important thing that you ever did? He immediately said,
- 'Not the double helix.' The reason being that he thought it was inevitable that if they hadn't
- discovered it in March 1953, somebody else would have done. It was not something that was out of
- the reach. It simply needed focused attention and a particular approach and a certain amounts
- of data which I'll talk about without. It was not any great insight beyond that. It was going
- to be discovered. The main people he thought were going to discover it were probably either
- Pauling, Linus Pauling, who already published a completely wrong structure. Maurice Wilkins from
- King's College London and obviously Rosalind Franklin, who is also from King's College London,
- and was just stopping working on DNA at the time that Watson and Crick made their discovery.
- So the issue, what I want to raise is how did they succeed, because they weren't supposed to
- be doing this work. They had other things to be getting on with viral structure or
- Crick's PhD, which is on protein structure. Yet in five or six weeks they were able to
- resolve something that had beaten these three very eminent minds. What is it that Watson and
- Crick were able to, how were they able to do it? Well, firstly, you've got to recall that they
- had months and months of discussion with Wilkins chatting because they were friends. Crick had been
- friends with Wilkins since 1947, and there would be endless chat, and letters, discussion about
- the latest data that Wilkins had got, ideas, information, lots and lots of gossip about
- Franklin, because Wilkins and Franklin did not get on, and Wilkins largely poisoned the mind of
- Watson and Crick against Franklin, even though they barely knew her. They kind of
- sided with Wilkins in these very personal disputes that took place between the two.
- They also were given access to key data from Wilkins and Franklin. In Franklin's case,
- it did not involve stealing her data. I can talk about this in the Q&A if you really want,
- but myself and Nathaniel Comfort have written quite extensively about this, about the complexity
- and the extremely relaxed nature of relations between Franklin and Watson and Crick, despite
- the way you might have read it in Watson's book. They were also driven by the sense that they were
- racing with Pauling. They had a limited amount of time. Crick had a particularly limited amount of
- time because he had to finish his thesis, without that he couldn't go to America and he had tickets
- already booked on a steamer to leave in August. So there were there was immense pressure on them.
- They thought that the big bad wolf, Linus Pauling, would get to the right solution and
- they had to get on with it. So they're very, very driven for a very short period of time.
- Also, Crick's particular approach to the mysteries of X-ray crystallography involved a mixture
- of science and mathematics, but also art and intuition. And that was something that he used all
- throughout his life. It wasn't simply a rigorous, logical approach. There was also this artistic
- and intuitive aspect to his way of thinking. They also finally, for the technically minded,
- they were completely barking up the wrong tree as sadly was Rosalind Franklin. So the DNA molecule
- is a double helix, and connecting the two strands like rungs on a ladder are pairs of things called
- bases. Watson and Crick were using the wrong structures so they couldn't make it fit because
- it couldn't fit with the structures they'd found in a book. Somebody who happened to be
- sharing their office, a chemist called Jerry Donohue said, 'No, that's not right. You need
- to use these forms.' Then they discovered that he was in fact correct. Franklin sadly
- did not have a Jerry Donohue to put her right. Finally, I think, and this is what I'm going to
- talk about from now on. They had somebody else. Watson and Crick had each other. Franklin was
- doing all her work on her own, as was Wilkins. Watson and Crick had somebody to argue with and
- collaborate with, and this is something that Crick did throughout his life. I thought this
- was extremely interesting, that he always had a co-worker, a partner. The first person he had
- was a man called Georg Kreisel who they met during the war. Kreisel was a mathematician, a logician,
- and they talked about absolutely everything for 60 years, over 60 years. Their correspondence is
- absolutely vast and in Chrysler's case, quite eye-popping. They would argue about everything
- from Wittgenstein to the double helix to neuroscience to abstruse bits of logic that Crick
- couldn't really follow, but Kreisel was insistent on them talking about. They developed this way of
- arguing, which was extremely important for Crick. He then developed this a bit with Watson. They
- didn't work together for very long. Primarily there was a few months in early 1953 and then
- again on viruses. Above all, he really developed this with somebody I'm going to
- talk about in some detail Sydney Brenner from 1950s, late 1956 onwards. For nearly 20 years
- they worked and argued every day talking about absolutely anything and everything.
- He also worked with Leslie Orgel on the origin of life, Peter Lawrence on development,
- Graeme Mitchison on neural nets and also a rather strange theory of dreams which may or may not be
- true. Probably not. Finally, for the last 15 years, with Christof Koch on consciousness.
- Now you'll notice one thing about them all they're all blokes, the other thing
- you won't know is that they're all younger than him and many of them are from different
- countries. Sydney Brenner was South American, Watson was American, Kreisel was Austrian,
- Koch was German American. This otherness was clearly important to Crick that he could, there
- was somebody who was not like him who would say different things and who would then challenge him.
- Now he also worked with a number of women. He either was very good friends with them
- or published with them. Beatrice Magdoff and Leslie Barnett he published with Franklin,
- Treisman, Churchill and Rockland, were all people through, at the bottom, all during
- his work on neuroscience, with whom he interacted and exchanged letters and discussed and argued,
- but not in the same kind of immediate focused way that he had on those key partners. So Crick was
- never working on his own. I don't think I found one example of something he just worked out on
- his own. That interaction with somebody else was absolutely essential to his way of proceeding.
- Now what happened after the double helix. I think this is where it gets interesting. If the double
- helix was kind of inevitable, as Watson argued, and that whatever somebody, was going to find it,
- what happened next was not inevitable, and that relied on Crick. The discovery,
- surprisingly didn't immediately transform science because DNA's role in heredity was not proven, it
- still wasn't demonstrated. The structure suggested it very strongly, but there was not experimental
- evidence for many years to come, and it became increasingly a working hypothesis. What was
- interesting was that Crick thought about, well, what does this mean? What are the implications
- of this structure and the way it seems to work? He was the only person to think hard about these
- things, and he changed the way that we all think about genetics, life and evolution, as I'll show.
- Although these ideas would have been discovered because things are inevitable largely in science,
- they would have been done in a very different way. So the first thing he did was to even
- coin the phrase genetic code. That word didn't exist and this appeared in the second article
- they published in Nature, after the first one with the double helix structure, six weeks later this
- article in which they say, 'It seems therefore, that the precise sequence of the bases is the
- code which carries the genetical information.' That phrase is said every day in universities and
- high schools all over the world. People explain science this way how genes work and what they
- do. It's Crick who comes up with these ideas. All these ideas are floating around in the zeitgeist,
- but he puts sequence code information together. I think this is so important that my book,
- Life's Greatest Secret, is in fact really all about this sentence and its meaning.
- He then thought about, well, what actually happens when genes are busy? What do they do?
- He came up with something fancy he called the Central Dogma. He didn't realise what a dogma
- was. Let's leave it to one side. He meant a general, a central principle, a central
- agreed view that scientists had, but for which there wasn't necessarily experimental evidence.
- He drew this little diagram. Basically, what it's saying is that your information in DNA can
- go into RNA, which is a little molecule and that can produce a protein and sometimes maybe even,
- he hypothesised, RNA might be able to go back into DNA. We now know that's the case. There are
- viruses that will do this. The key point is the protein can't. The information in a protein can't
- get back into DNA or RNA. There's no way, no known biological way, and no reason why protein can
- change your DNA. And that is really important for modern views of evolutionary biology because
- it means your DNA, your genes can't be affected by experience. No matter what
- you might have heard about epigenetics, the DNA sequence cannot be affected by your experience.
- So Darwin's idea, it's well-known that the sons of blacksmiths have big arms because the blacksmiths
- got big arms because he's been using them a lot. That's just not true. It doesn't work that way.
- It cannot work that way. This central dogma, which was Crick's key argument as actually the basis of
- modern understandings of genetics and evolution. Together with Sydney Brenner, he came up with
- the idea of messenger RNA in a particularly excitable meeting in April 1960. You've all
- heard about messenger RNA because of the vaccines, but this was hypothesis. There
- was experimental evidence that didn't make any sense. Brenner and Crick put it all together,
- realised this was what must be going on, and then devised experiments that Brenner and
- Francois Jacob and Matt Meselson carried out that summer. Crick did some experiments on the showing
- that the genetic code is read in three letters or virtually certainly showing that many scientists
- adore this article because of its elegance. He also at the same time began to discuss the
- possibility that a lot of our DNA seems not to be turned into RNA or protein. It seems to be doing
- nothing. This is before any DNA sequencing. It's just looking at the amount of DNA in an organism,
- the amount of RNA and saying, wait a minute, that that doesn't quite fit, there's a gap.
- There's an awful lot of DNA which isn't getting turned into RNA. So he thought about this and
- what it might mean and eventually wrote articles around this, which were extremely significant for
- evolutionary biologists talking about the role of junk DNA and also the fragmentation of our genes
- are all not in one long sequence of ACTG. They're broken up by bits and the cell has to stick them
- together during their expression. He discussed this as well and its implications when this
- was discovered in the late 1970s. But a lot of this, as I've said,
- was done with these, what we call mad sessions with Sydney Brenner. So that's Brenner on the
- right. They met first in 1954, in America, and then Brenner came from South Africa to
- work in Cambridge. Where he worked and where a lot of this was done was known as The Hut. So this is
- in the, it's been demolished now, in fact, this was just before it was demolished. You can see
- the removal men are in and The Hut was where the laboratory for molecular biology of the MRC was
- based. It's in the Cavendish Quad and Room 103 is just up here. So there's these tiny little
- rooms is where much of the work that led to five Nobel Prize, five people winning Nobel Prizes
- in 1962 Watson, Crick and Wilkins, and Kendrew and Perutz. All the key work was done in here,
- and Brenner and Crick would argue every day. Now you may notice that Hans Boye who was Crick's,
- one of Crick's few PhD students. He's taking these pictures. He's also taken a picture of this,
- which is a blackboard. He's rescued a blackboard from inside The Hut and he's put it there and
- thankfully took a picture of it because we can actually see how Brenner and Crick
- interacted. This is one of their blackboards. This is discussing various problems associated
- with the nature of the triplet code. It's also got, somebody's going to play squash
- and there's various references to authors and there's these are all their hypotheses
- experiments. So they would scribble furiously. They had three blackboards and they would use
- them all the time. We can actually see this has actually been kind of preserved in aspic.
- So they were well aware of how the currently almost unique way they had of working together.
- Going to play you some little clips that Andrew Luck Baker squirrelled together for me
- for our programme about, our World Service programme about Sydney Brenner. And you'll
- hear first Crick and then Brennan's South African accent talking about how they work.
- Francis Crick [video playing]: We did share an office for whatever it was 20 odd years,
- but he was often in the lab. Then he'd come in and then he'd tell me what he'd been
- doing or I'd raise something I'd been reading and we'd been just chat away.
- Sydney Brenner [video playing]: The one thing that we did have was a rule
- that you could say anything that would come into your head. Now most of these
- conversations were just complete nonsense. Every now and then we did this because a
- half-formed idea could be taken up by the other one and really refined.
- Francis Crick [video playing]: Of course, you have to be candid. This is perhaps
- the most important thing. So you can say something which sounds rather aggressive,
- but the other person knows that's just the way that you usually disagree with him, you see,
- and you say if you say, 'Oh, that's all nonsense,' he doesn't turn a hair and you must of course try
- and attack the other person's ideas because it's getting rid of the false ideas, which is the
- most important thing in developing the good ones. That's what the collaboration is most useful for.
- Sydney Brenner [video playing]: I think a lot of the good ideas and a
- lot of the good things that we produced were produced in these completely mad sessions.
- Matthew Cobb: So that's how they work together. That's a similar kind of process that Crick used
- with his other collaborators. In particular, Christof Koch describes a very similar process
- they went through, slightly less animated because by that time it was in his 70s, but nonetheless
- the same intense argument, debate, sometimes talking rubbish, trying to put ideas together.
- Now his work with Brenner came to an end in 1977, when he finally left the UK to go and work in work
- at La Jolla at the Salk Institute in San Diego. Now this is how the Sunday Times presented it,
- as though Crick was some kind of tax exile, like Mick Jagger or Tony Jacklin, the golfer.
- This is just complete nonsense. Crick told the journalist so, but the journalist just made it up.
- Crick left because the MRC wanted him to retire and he could neither afford to retire,
- having joined the MRC in his late 30s. Nor did he want to, he wanted to carry on working. So
- he got a job. He was given a job at the at the Salk Institute who were desperate to have him.
- He spent the last 27 years working at the Salk. When he was there, he was working on
- the brain you can see in the background. This is Jacob Bronowski's study the great… Well,
- he's a polymath and also presenter of The Ascent of Man. Bronowski had worked at the
- Salk as well and was a good friend of Crick's. Nathaniel Comfort asked me on social media the
- other day. He said, 'Well, what did Crick actually do during this period of neuroscience? I don't
- get why he was so significant,' and he didn't make a single breakthrough. He didn't change
- anything. Then nobody else has done either. We're basically stuck with ideas about the
- brain and thinking that have been very, very similar for many, many decades. So Crick didn't
- make a great breakthrough. He didn't crack consciousness, but he was a huge influence.
- His starting point was he wanted to understand consciousness. Now this is pretty bold. I remember
- when I was an undergraduate about the same time, not quite as smart as Crick and we sat around. I
- was a psychology undergraduate. This was back in the day when neuroscience barely existed
- and we sat around. I remember us saying, well, consciousness, yes, can't see how to get a handle
- on it. Not terribly interesting because of that. So one day it will be resolved, but we don't know
- and it's probably just some kind of epiphenomenon of all these neurones getting active. Now,
- Crick thankfully wasn't quite as kind of dismissive as we were. On the other hand,
- he didn't make a great breakthrough either, but he changed the way we think about this began.
- He's never written anything on neuroscience. Scientific American, which in those days was a
- really big deal, published a huge special issue on the brain with all of the greats of neuroscience
- publishing in it. Then the final article was by Francis Crick, who this interloper, who was very
- renowned, had a huge reputation, was clearly very clever. What on earth did he know about
- neuroscience? How could he tell anybody anything about the brain? Well, he actually charted it out.
- What was going to happen? If you read this article today, nearly half a century later,
- it's quite remarkable in quite how modern it seems and also quite how far-seeing. He emphasised
- that we were going to have to understand brain structure down to the cellular level, and the way
- we do that would be by either developing, or other people developing new molecular tools. So he's
- telling neuroscientists what they've got to do. He emphasised the importance of working with
- computer models of the brain. This was partly because of the influence of David Marr,
- a young neuroscientist and computational biologist and mathematician who was working
- on vision. Tragically, Marr died of leukaemia in his early 30s, and had he not died because he was
- already working very closely with Crick, he would undoubtedly have been another of Crick's group of
- co-thinkers. Crick said, 'We need to focus on something which we can understand.' We know a
- lot about visual awareness was what he chose and he also said not very optimistically but actually
- quite accurately, 'Whatever choices are made about what to tackle first, it seems we have a long way
- to go to reach even an outline understanding of brain function that is solidly based on
- both experiment and theory.' I think that's well, that's pretty much where we are today.
- He also was heavily involved in a group called the Parallel Distributed Processing Group.
- This was pure chance. He happened to be in San Diego, La Jolla, where this group of cognitive
- biologists and mathematicians and computational scientists got together, and started using what
- are in fact the ancestors of today's AI. They published two volumes, huge academic volumes
- which sold over 50000 copies. Now academics in the audience will know that even back in the day,
- academic books did not sell that kind of number. Astonishing sales figures for books of chapters
- by leading experts including Geoff Hinton and John Hopfield who, as I'm sure you know, won the Nobel
- Prize for their work on neural nets last year. So he's actually right in the heart of things.
- He's been working with Marr, who was a complete game changer in terms of how people thought about
- visual processing. Now he's thinking about in the early '80s about how brain processes may
- take place using… How you can model them using computers, that as I say, basically today's AI
- is just a souped up version of these PDPs that these people developed. He then applied this to
- thinking about neuroscience and in particular his Theory of Dreams, which he published with
- Graeme Mitchison, which was published in Nature. He insisted that, because he had a huge influence
- at Nature, he could basically pick up the phone and tell him to do something and they would jump.
- It was quite amazing. Basically he said, 'Look, I'm not publishing this with you,' because they
- really wanted the dreams article and it did cause a huge furore, great excitement. 'I'm not
- publishing the dreams article unless you publish this little article by Hopfield John Hopfield,
- which shows that these neural nets do something very similar to the process that we think is
- happening when we have dreams.' The key point here is that not whether Crick was right or wrong about
- dreams, but rather he's saying and he insists, and the journal recognises this and went along
- with it. That this was a way of when you've got theorising about everyday psychological phenomena,
- and secondly, you've got this tool for trying to understand how it might work, which you can model
- in a computer. That was absolutely a major breakthrough and caused a huge row for the
- dream theory, people who studied dreams and sleep because there were many physiologists.
- Now here was this person saying they had to think about kind of computational biology,
- but for the computational people this was a major breakthrough.
- He again was emphasising throughout his life the need for neuroanatomy, very precise details.
- Again, this was something that most people studying the brain were remaining with very broad
- brush ideas. He wanted to know number of cell types, questions that most neuroscientists,
- most neuroanatomists were not interested in. As I said, he used his influence for
- nearly half a century. He published in Nature either his own articles or material that he was
- writing about other people's work or getting other people to get published in Nature.
- Or in one case, when an article got rejected, because it was not interesting by somebody else.
- He said he wrote to Nature and said, 'Look, this is outrageous. You should publish it.' They did
- publish it and it went on to become a foundation of neuroscience and has been cited, I think, 5000
- times. So his judgement was sometimes accurate, and these weren't necessarily pals. It wasn't
- a matter of pushing his mates. It was a matter of pushing ideas that he thought was important.
- Just to give you some idea. So they often weren't articles. They were think pieces,
- and one of the things about his writing style, if you read his articles quite how clear he was,
- and a lot of this I argue in the biography and he admitted himself it goes way, way back to his
- fascination with a book called The Children's Encyclopaedia. Some of you may have seen copies
- of this in your childhood, or they belonged to your parents. This was a huge, multi-volume,
- very Edwardian book published in 1908 that Crick said was the most important book he ever read,
- kept it for the rest of his life. His son Michael now has it, sadly, as he said to me in an email,
- 'Francis was a very good boy and he didn't write on it.' So you can see it's been well read,
- but he didn't write any notes. So this is about an article,
- The Recent Excitement About Neural Networks. This is a kind of patrician tone that he would jokingly
- involve. This is to try and limit the excitement. Having lit the blue touch paper with the PDPs now
- people are going crazy and imagining all sorts of things without biological reality. He was kind of
- pulling them back and saying no, your ideas about how these systems may work have got to
- be based in biological reality, otherwise they're going to be useless for neuroscience. They might
- be great for computers, but I'm interested in understanding how brains work. This is a kind
- of cry of rage about how little we knew, it's from 1993, how little we knew about the structure
- of the human brain at the cellular level. Then finally, this very significant article
- which you wrote with Christof Koch, which appeared in Nature Neuroscience, where they talk about the
- key thing they've got to do is to understand the search for the neural correlates of consciousness,
- which I'll explain a little bit more. Now, I've been writing a lot about Crick
- and Nature and thinking about it. I'm working on a little article about it at the moment. I'm going
- to try and convince Nature to publish if they fancy it and I thought I knew everything about it.
- I thought I'd plumbed all the… Read the letters, even in some cases reviewers giving him a good
- kicking, which happened rarely, but it did in the case of the dream article. Then two days ago I was
- looking for something else and I came across this editorial. This is a page editorial in April 19th,
- 2003. So it's a few weeks after the huge, immense celebrations there were for the 50th
- anniversary of the double helix and Nature decided to publish a whole article about a
- man who's 86 and his work on consciousness and quite how significant and important it is. Now,
- partly that's just because he's still doing research, right? He's still thinking. He's
- still publishing, unlike virtually everybody else who went into some kind of administration. He is
- still producing world class scientific ideas. Now, what he actually did about consciousness
- and why it's important is, as I said, looking for these neural correlates. This is what me and my
- group of cocky undergraduate pals didn't come up with! We should have done, that is something's
- happening in the brain. When you see something, something is, the set of brain neural networks are
- being activated. That's the first step is to try and identify what that correlate is. It doesn't
- mean to say that's where consciousness is, but that's the first step we know okay,
- I can see something over there, and if you can record from it in an animal then you can actually
- identify those neural correlates. What he actually did through being,
- his reputation. People said he made consciousness respectable. That is as I said, when most people
- in the '70s and '80s were not interested in they thought this was an undoable problem and could
- be left to the philosophers who'd been fiddling around with it for kind of 2500 years and hadn't
- got very far. So Crick, however, changed all that, partly through his popular writings as
- well. Really, he's kind of responsible for all the nonsense you now read about, quantum woo
- and consciousness and all sorts of stuff which began almost as soon as he started making it more
- acceptable. Must be said, there are now over 200 theories of consciousness, which suggests they've
- kind of lost their way, I think. I think means they can't actually agree what they're studying.
- If it was in any other field, you'd just look at it and go, well, okay, that's a mess.
- Crick's approach I think was really important, and that's what I humbly suggest, the consciousness
- researchers need to get back to. Like during the period of the genetic code, he was recognised as
- an intellectual leader. He wasn't he wasn't the Oppenheimer of any of this, Oppenheimer was above
- all an organiser and there was a huge amount of engineering involved in the Manhattan Project.
- Crick was an incompetent administrator. It was not his forte at all. He was an intellectual idea. He
- was a thinker. He was, ideas were his thing. I think that his four questions that he developed
- with Christof Koch are still the best place for anybody to start. Just think about these.
- So there are some neurones that are correlated with your activity. When I see your face,
- I can see this room. There's a set of activity, there's nothing else, it's just
- a set of neurones. So where are they? Are those neurones of any particular type? What is special,
- if anything, about their connections? Or is it all just some kind of big mush, or is there
- anything specific going on and what is special, if anything, about the way they're activated, about
- the way they fire? Those four questions we know some of these answers now. We have been able to
- identify some neural correlates of consciousness when people see certain faces, for example, or a
- picture of the Sydney Opera House, then very, very particular sets of… This is in humans, very, very
- particular sets of neurones may be activated in a given individual. Those won't be the same neurones
- as in you or me, but in that particular patient you present the Sydney Opera House or a picture of
- Jennifer Aniston. These are real examples and you always get the same set of neurones firing. That
- hasn't necessarily resolved the issue of what's going on, but it's established the first set.
- One of his final papers, which was again produced around the millennium at the time of the Wedgwood
- plate, was this article which published by the Royal Society in the world's longest running,
- continuously running scientific journal, the Philosophical Transactions. It was
- full of stuff about the millennium. This was a product of his renewed collaboration with
- Sydney Brenner because Brenner had now moved to… He'd retired from the MRC and he'd now moved to
- California. In this article he says, 'Okay, what we need to be able to do, up until now,
- people have been identifying cell types, different neurones by their shape,' which basically goes
- back to the 19th century. He said, 'Now we should be able to identify them by the kind of messenger
- RNA that is being produced by that cell, by what the genes that are active in a cell. So
- two cells may have exactly the same shape but a different activity, and we should be able to
- identify that through the messenger RNA.' He said, 'To work out function, maybe we
- can genetically engineer neurones so that they can be activated by, say, a pulse of
- light and that will provide a controllable stimulus. We can then see what happens,
- how the animal behaves when we stimulate it in a particular way.' He also suggested that the
- human genome which they were just finishing could be used. The genetic markers you can
- identify from the human genome could be used to compare our brains with those of other primates,
- because we should share some of these genes because we're just very, very smart primates.
- Now the neuroscientists or people who've been paying attention to neuroscience will
- know that all of these things are now absolutely widespread and routine. When he wrote about them,
- they were fantasies. Although he did get an email from somebody after about three months
- later saying that business about using light, optogenetics, it's called, we've just done that
- in our lab. They were absolutely overjoyed that cricket actually predicted what they were already
- trying to do and hadn't been able to do. So these are called RNAseq optogenetics, transcriptomics.
- They're widespread, they are meat and drink to neuroscience laboratories all over the world.
- Now, Crick died in July 2004, aged 88, of bowel cancer. The year before, Peter Lawrence, who'd
- worked with him on development in Cambridge, went on holiday with his wife Birgitta to stay with the
- Crick's at their desert house in Borrego Springs. They were going out for a hike. The Crick's adored
- this place, they'd built a… Francis had designed this house, they'd built this fantastic house out
- in the desert. They went out for a walk, for a hike, and because of the chemo he was taking,
- Francis was too poorly to be able to walk. So they left him. Peter says
- they left him sitting in this director's chair reading an article on neural nets.
- They came back two hours later and he's still there, still reading. That basically sums up
- what he did because he said, 'I read and think, 'when his granddaughter, Kindra Crick went to see
- him at the Salk Institute, she said when she was a teenager in the early '90s, she said,
- 'What do you do all day, granddad?' He said, 'I think,' and that's what he did. That's what he
- could read and think and then try and work out an interesting angle on what he was reading. He would
- read rubbish that was apparent nonsense because he would say there might be something in it.
- So how he was able to do all this, which was my starting point. You've got to remember,
- first of all, he's living in a world that is dreamlike to most academics today. You
- cannot imagine how lucky he was. He was paid to do research first by the MRC, then by the
- Salk. He never taught. He never marked a paper. He didn't have to worry about all the nonsense
- about exam boards and all the rest of it that your average academic has to go through. Furthermore,
- because of the times that they were living in, he was a loving father and husband, but it was
- Odile who ran the household and organised their notorious parties. It was Odile who actually made
- the relationship function in other social terms, in terms of the family and getting the girls to
- school and all the rest of it. Again, that I mean, it's partly what Dorothy Hodgkin said when she was
- asked about how a woman could succeed in science. She said, 'Good childcare, have a nanny,' that's
- how she was able to win her Nobel Prize. So that was extremely significant,
- that social background and again the lack of other constraints and administrative nonsense. The way
- he actually did it. That lots of people had those luxuries, especially in the '50s and '60s. The way
- he did it was he also he would think, he would argue, he would write short informal articles
- that he would circulate amongst people to try and codify his thinking, develop hypotheses,
- that's all. He'd come up with these theories, but the theories were always designed to provoke
- experimentalists. This is what we need to know. So he wasn't, with all his work on consciousness,
- unlike most of the books you read about consciousness today, he's not trying to
- explain it all. He's just saying, how can we make the next step? What do we need to know?
- So this is theorising, but with a very clear eye on experimental evidence, which is going to
- be the ultimate arbiter of who's right and who's wrong. He was also very interested in structures,
- DNA structure, structure of the brain. Not simply because he thought that function emerges from
- structure, but that it was essential to know what on earth you were you were looking at.
- He would also with Brenner, he developed this rather alarming habit of setting aside apparently
- contradictory results. So if they had an idea, an explanation, they had a datapoint that did
- not fit. They would say, well, don't worry, we'll worry about that later on, if everything else is
- making sense, then let's go with it and we can figure it out in the end it will all make sense.
- In that 1961 article about the structure of how many letters there are in the genetic code. They
- had hundreds of datapoints that didn't make sense and they just said, well, we'll deal
- with them later, and they published, so scientists aren't supposed to do this right? You don't hide,
- or say, I'm not going to talk about these data. They did, in fact, they were confident they didn't
- make any sense. They weren't systematic. In the end, we'll be able to explain them,
- and indeed they were. They published a huge great big article in the Philosophical Transactions
- which nobody read because it was so boring and explaining every one of these exceptions to
- their work. So this is very dangerous. I'd be very wary about teaching this to students. Don't worry,
- because, between what's good and what's you can ignore, it's very hard to tell.
- Above all, he had this endless curiosity and a profound sense of fun which probably hasn't come
- over too much in this talk, but I hope if you read the book, you'll see that it's a word that talking
- to the people who work with him, the word came up over and over again. Fun. So I haven't talked
- much about Crick, the man at all, mainly about his science. If you want to know more both about
- science and the man, then the book will be out in November and that's it. Thank you very much.
- David Baulcombe: Matthew, thank you so much for a wonderful, fascinating lecture. We now
- have a few minutes for questions and hopefully answers from Matthew. If you have questions
- then you should enter them on the system that you've been told about I understand or that will
- come up on the stage slido.com, and if that doesn't work, eventually we'll resort to the
- old-fashioned way of putting your hand up. Anyway, let's get started with the various questions.
- If I could start [signal breaks up 0:56:15.5] individual. So was it
- just chance or was it something about his upbringing? Or was the shaping influences
- in his early life that turned him into that extraordinary individual.
- Matthew Cobb: Well, you wouldn't know anything about… You wouldn't make any
- prediction that it was going to do anything particularly significant
- until the late 1940s. He was born in 1916, so he got a 2:1, which is fine,
- from UCL in physics. He then started doing a PhD, which he abandoned because of the outbreak
- of the war. He worked in naval intelligence during the war, worked on mines. None of this,
- it was all very good stuff, but none of it was earth shattering. It's only when he starts to
- think when he gets to Cambridge in 1947 that he decides he wants to go back into science
- after he leaves the leaves naval intelligence and he decides there are two things he wants to crack.
- These two questions are the nature of life, and the nature of consciousness. He writes this
- little statement which he sent to the MRC saying, please take me on as a student, this is what I
- want to do, which is pretty bold stuff. Yet that's actually what he did. It's quite extraordinary,
- I think the way he thought and the way he went about things, that's largely due to Kreisel,
- without him, Kreisel as a logician and also someone who is interested in philosophy,
- had this astonishing way of getting to the real heart of the matter and not allowing any kind of
- vague thinking. So I think that it's Kreisel who really shapes him. It's this decision to
- go back into science and then it is luck, right? So if he'd never met Jim Watson, he'd never worked
- on DNA. He would have given Maurice Wilkins a few bits of advice, but he would not have
- worked on it. If Watson had fallen under a bus, Crick wouldn't have finished it because
- there wouldn't have been the drive to do so. He might have gone on to win a Nobel Prize through
- working with Perutz and Kendrew on haemoglobin and myoglobin, but he wouldn't have done the
- amazing things. I don't think. So it's a mixture of this change in his mind in the late '40s and
- new ways, this very precise way of thinking, a collaborative way. Then secondly, a lot of luck.
- David Baulcombe: So here's a question from the floor,
- AS, does modern academia with such competition for funding tenured positions,
- etc. still allow for the level of collaboration seen in Crick's scientific life.
- Matthew Cobb: Probably not. I mean, Nature has had some articles about this recently about how
- we need, academics need time to think. I'm sure the academics in the audience know that it's very
- rare that you can just sit down and think about something you've always got something else doing.
- Secondly, collaboration is, as the questioner asks, extremely, extremely intense. It must be
- said that Crick only wrote one grant application in his whole life. That was, I think he asked,
- and this was in 1982. He asked for about $8 million, which was an extraordinary sum,
- about $40 million or something today. He got about a quarter of it. That was not his job.
- What did he need? He needed to talk to people. He needed to bring people to come and see him.
- He needed people to work around him and work with him. So he had no great experimental
- needs. A bit of chalk and a blackboard and his amazing mind was basically what he needed.
- David Baulcombe: We have a question from Matthew Todd. He says,
- I remember a quote which I think was Crick, which was something like,
- 'I have a good idea about once every six months.' Was that him?
- Matthew Cobb: I don't know. I haven't heard that quote, it could well be. I think what he would
- have added is that I had also about 2000 absolute rubbish ideas, and it's being able to sift the two
- is part of the art, I think that often marks out the great scientists. Many of us who are
- not quite so… Don't make such achievements tend to focus on the less incisive of dollar questions and
- being bold enough to try and target the really big questions. I think that's also an issue.
- David Baulcombe: Okay, thank you. Stephen Curry says your overview of Crick's contributions
- to neuroscience reminds me of Bernal, named in the prize, who was influential in making
- many discoveries in the same way. So did Bernal and Crick interact or influence?
- David Baulcombe: Well, yes, he came close. History could have taken a different turn because Crick
- wanted to go and work with Bernard when he was going to, decided he wanted to go back,
- and go back into science after the war. He thought about going to work with Bernal, who was at
- Birkbeck and had just started working on DNA. For various reasons it just didn't work out, partly
- because he was getting a training grant from the MRC, and the MRC said, look, you don't know
- anything about biology, you want to do all this life and the brain stuff, you're a physicist,
- you need to learn some biology. Bernal, who was a physicist, chemist and X-ray crystallography. He
- can't teach you that. So that never happened. On the other hand, Crick was always very…
- He always recognised Bernal's role and when Bernal retired he a really lovely letter to
- him saying that without his work on structure of molecules before the war, then none of the work by
- Dorothy Hodgkin, by Perutz, by Kendrew, by himself would ever have been able to take place.
- David Baulcombe: I've got to slightly modify a question we've got here. So
- the question is should we be naming institutions after prominent scientists?
- Matthew Cobb: I think it's a bad idea!
- David Baulcombe: My variation on that is what would Crick
- make of the idea that an institute is named after?
- Matthew Cobb: I think it would be rather unhappy. So he was he was really very,
- very private. So there's been a lot of hoo-ha. So one of the things I didn't… I had a list of stuff
- on the other sheet after my acknowledgements, my thanks. Of stuff I wasn't going to talk about, and
- one of the things I wasn't going to talk about, and I'm not going to talk about here, but it is in
- the book is very Edwardian ideas about eugenics, which has caused a number of people to say, well,
- why are we naming this institute after him? My advice to any people who end up at high rank in a
- university or other institutions is do not name buildings after people because you don't know
- what the future holds and you know things that may seem acceptable now will turn out to be, or views
- will turn out to be unacceptable in the future. I think above all, he would not have liked it. I
- don't think he would have liked the biography, he accepted towards the end of his life that there
- were going to be two biographies written of him one by Bob Olby, which is a very academic study
- which is largely about X-ray crystallography, and the other very stylish short book by Matt Ridley,
- which were both written, appearing a few years after his death. I don't think he would have liked
- a nosey parker burrowing around in his affairs. I think he would have been… I suspect he would not
- have liked having a building named. He would have been flattered, I'm sure, but you know.
- David Baulcombe: o one of the previous laureates, Philip Ball, asks Crick trained
- first as a physicist and it seems to me that he thought like one all his life. Do you agree?
- Matthew Cobb: No, no. It was undoubtedly important, but what was very, very striking
- was quite how much of a biologist he became. So any biologist who've encountered physicists,
- or encountered physicists wanting to move into biology know that they think it's dead easy,
- right? It's straightforward, it's elegant, whereas biology isn't. It's messy. Crick
- never used the word elegant. He used a very different word to describe his results,
- beautiful or biology or findings. I think there's two very different,
- elegance is the kind of things you get in maths and physics and it all makes sense, whereas
- biology is virtually never so. It is messy, it's lumpy and it has very contingent explanations.
- I think that Crick very much, he trained as a physicist for physics and maths. His degree was in
- physics and maths and then he did this for about six months, he worked on the pressure of water or
- something. I can't remember exactly what it was before a bomb blew it up in UCL. A German bomb
- that must be added. This was during the war. Then he's working on electronics in mines. It's kind of
- physics but it's a very different mindset. When he changes his mind, it really is to start embracing
- ideas about biology. As I tried to indicate his role in fact in evolutionary biology, which most
- evolutionary biologists don't know was really, really important without his thinking about
- many of those things, including the breaking, the fragmentation of genes in multicellular organisms
- or the amount of junk DNA that there may be in in our cells, they were very, very important. It's a
- very it's not a physicist's way of thinking about things. So I respectfully disagree.
- David Baulcombe: So the MRC put together Watson
- and Crick and Brenner and Kendrew and Perutz in that Hut that you showed us.
- Matthew Cobb: Well, Watson wasn't in there. They weren't in there. He wasn't in there,
- no. But Kendrew, so yes, four Nobel, well three Nobel Prize prizes came
- out of there. So Kendrick, Crick and Perutz. Yes, it's quite extraordinary.
- David Baulcombe: So would this work today if we were able to identify brilliant people? Clearly
- these were, it would have been obvious they're very clever people. If funding agencies just put
- together very clever people who were interested in fundamental problems that were going to make
- the life of the planet better if they could be solved and just let them get on with it.
- Matthew Cobb: Well, I think most scientists in the room would say,
- well, yes, duh. But that's not the way it works.
- David Baulcombe: It's not going to happen.
- Matthew Cobb: It's not going to happen because those of you who are taxpayers and not scientists,
- say, why should this person go to study like in my case, how a maggots nose works. Why on
- earth would you want to pay for that? What's the point of any of it? So scientists now have
- to say what the point is. They have to, not only when you put in a grant, not only say basically
- what results do you expect to find, which is kind of the opposite of doing science quietly
- because you're not sure what's going to happen. You also have to say what are going to be the
- consequence of that? How can money be made? How can it enrich people's lives? Which is great.
- But an awful lot of science like Peter Higgs, you know, working out his equations on his own,
- or Sydney Brenner, who pioneered the development of the using this tiny worm to understand
- development. He took over ten years to publish his first article on this worm and that would
- be completely impossible today. That having been said, the LMB in Cambridge does have a remarkable
- track record of churning out Nobel Prizes if you use the Nobel Prize as some sort of indicator
- of academic worth, then they're getting something right. Although I'm sure they
- would equally complain about these restrictions and requirements to write in a particular way
- and say what you're going to do, what you're going to find and why it's important. Which may
- just be, well, it's really interesting and who knows what's going to happen.
- David Baulcombe: We're getting to the end of our time, but I'll just field a
- couple of others. So one I think we'll pass over. Can you tell us
- about Crick's notorious parties? I think there's tabloid stuff.
- Matthew Cobb: Well, I can't really, they had, hey, people had racy parties. Who knew? The past
- was really not very different from the present. So those, many of you of an older age will have
- forgotten the youthful parties you used to go to. The Crick's had a lot of fun at their parties.
- David Baulcombe: Good. So a final question from Chloe Hall.
- Isn't it curious that he was so prolific, but sat tight at the Salk Institute. I would
- imagine moving around as a scientist is a helpful way to get new ideas.
- Matthew Cobb: Well, he got people to come to him. You've got to remember he started at the Salk
- when he was only a couple of years younger than I am. So very soon he had a lot of problem, health
- issues about getting very, very tired, didn't like transatlantic travel, so he did the opposite,
- he got people to come to him. So they were, part of the money for that big grant I described. He
- set up something called the Helmholtz Club, which had academics from all over the world
- would come and give a talk and be barracked by this tiny group of Nobel Prize winners. Said that
- this was the most prestigious audience they'd ever spoken in front of, 20 people and Crick
- lounging on a sofa at the back and occasionally lobbing devastating questions to the speaker.
- So this is kind of a big mad session getting these hapless academics. Even when they were given a bit
- of a rough time, they really enjoyed it and wanted to come back. So that's how he did it. I mean,
- I think the question is absolutely right. Also, he fell in love with California,
- fell in love with San Diego. If you've ever been to La Jolla, you can see why, and the deserts,
- the pictures that Peter Lawrence took of the house and everything around there,
- it was absolutely gorgeous. So why move if you can get people to come to you?
- David Baulcombe: Matthew, thank you so much. I'm always amazed by how much insight
- you provide into the topics that you choose to talk about, and this lecture is no exception,
- and I'm looking forward to your book appearing later on in the year,
- and as I'm sure many of the audience are. So a round of applause for
- you. My final task before we have refreshments is to present Matthew
- with the scroll and the medal for the Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Lecture.
- Matthew Cobb: Just to make clear,
- the Wilkins is nothing to do with Maurice Wilkins, its John Wilkins,
- who was a bishop and was the first secretary, or the second secretary of the Royal Society.
- David Baulcombe: In case you were wondering. Thank you. So, Matthew,
- congratulations, and a medal, and a brief handshake. Okay.
- Matthew Cobb: Yes, yes, yes.
- David Baulcombe: Okay, I think we should release everybody now.
- Matthew Cobb: Yes, you can go [unclear words 1:10:55.2].
Join us for the Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Prize Lecture given by 2024 winner Professor Matthew Cobb.
Scientists don’t often admit it to themselves, but most scientific discoveries are over-determined. If Watson or Crick had fallen under a bus in 1952, then Franklin, or Wilkins, or Pauling, or someone would soon have discovered the double helix in their place. Furthermore, as Crick put it in 2000, ‘Discoveries and inventions are more important than the people who make them.’ But sometimes the individual does matter. After the double helix was discovered, none of the clever people involved – not Watson, nor Franklin, nor Wilkins, nor Pauling – sought to draw out the deep implications of the structure. Only Crick did that, and his ideas, and the way he proceeded, influenced the course of discovery and the way we now think about genes and cells and evolution. Had Crick fallen under a bus in 1954, the course of science would have been different.
Having spent three intensive years immersed in writing a biography of Crick, Professor Cobb will use his life and work (not just the double helix!) to explore the role of individuals in scientific discovery and the importance of recent attempts to diversify the pool of scientists, something that is currently under attack.
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