Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code (Eminent Lives) by Matt Ridley

Author:Matt Ridley [Ridley, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 2012-01-17T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Triplets and Chapels

IN AUGUST 1960 Crick received news that he, Wilkins, and Watson were to be jointly awarded the Lasker Prize by the American Public Health Association for the double helix. With it came $2,500 each and a heavy statuette of the Winged Victory. Perhaps more important, everybody knew that the Lasker Prize was a frequent harbinger of the Nobel Prize. The Lasker was soon followed by the Prix Charles Léopold Meyer of the French Academy of Sciences, and in 1962 by the Award of Merit of the Gairdner Foundation in Canada.

Some time in 1961 Crick had a 3-foot metal helix made in the lab’s workshop. It was painted gold and erected above the door of 19 Portugal Place, which he now renamed the “Golden Helix.” It was a single, not a double, helix, indicating his pride in his first breakthrough in helical theory. Life at the Golden Helix was settling into a rhythm. Odile was painting and making pots in the third-floor studio. Gabrielle and Jacqueline found their father “not a hands-on, bedtime-story, teach-you-how-to-ride-a-bicycle kind of dad,” but he was a kindly presence. His efforts to teach them science, using items from the fruit bowl on the dining table to stand in for planets or particles, sometimes palled. The family only very rarely went to concerts or to the cinema. When Michael asked his father why they did not go to films more often, Crick pointed out that watching neurotic people on-screen was no better than doing so in real life. In the early years the family had no radio, no television, few magazines, and no daily newspaper. One of Michael’s chores was to buy a copy of the Observer every Sunday morning for his father to read in the bath.

But there were frequent parties, renowned for the pulchritude of the female guests and for the free-flowing punch. On one occasion the guests were asked to come dressed as “beachcombers or missionaries.” At another time, on Friday, 1 June 1962 at nine in the evening, the occasion was a “studio party” at the Golden Helix, for which the guests were dressed as “artists, models, or dancing girls.” A sketch of a nude, by Odile, embellished the invitation. When each guest arrived, he or she was handed a sketch pad and pencil and was encouraged to draw a nude model who was posing on a couch under a window in the studio. In staid Cambridge, this caused quite a sensation.

In February 1961, Crick took to the lab himself. He had an idea he wanted to test, and he had grown tired of waiting for Brenner to take it seriously. He taught himself phage-crossing techniques, picking tiny samples from plaques, crossing them with others on new bacterial lawns, and incubating the resulting plates for a few hours at 37 degrees Celsius. He was predictably clumsy and predictably argumentative with technicians about the reasons for doing things in certain ways. But he was determined to learn. He used two strains of

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