CRICK

From the structure of life to the matter of mind.

Francis Crick, the British biologist who, along with James Watson, won the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA, has always been a controversial figure—known for wild sex parties, endorsing eugenics, possibly stealing data. Cobb, a zoologist and science writer, wants to get these less savory aspects of Crick’s character out of the way quickly, suggesting, for instance, that Crick’s wife was “amused” and “sometimes profited” from his many affairs, the details of which, Cobb states, are “simply not our business.” Well, sure—but by that logic, neither is his gastric reflux or the print of his wallpaper, but Cobb is happy to share these in this exhaustively—and exhaustingly—detailed biography. Cobb is at his best when it comes to the science—able to explain in page-turning prose why, for instance, scientists once thought genes were made of proteins, not DNA, or what made it so challenging to deduce a molecule’s three-dimensional shape from two-dimensional images. It was truly a monumental achievement when Crick, as he announced in a 1953 letter to his 12-year-old son, “found the basic copying mechanism by which life, comes from life”—signed, “Daddy.” Cobb explains that Crick was drawn to questions that “seemed incomprehensible, so people tended to view them in a religious or mystical light”: What is life? What is mind? The latter landed him in La Jolla, California, in the 1960s, where he tripped on LSD and joined a group of scientists intent on proving Crick’s “astonishing hypothesis”: that the whole miracle of experience comes down to the firings of neurons in the brain, just as the miracle of life came down to genes coiled in a double helix. In trying to turn philosophical questions about the mind into experimental science, Crick, Cobb contends, “helped propel the development of modern neuroscience.” Unfortunately, the “neural correlates of consciousness” he sought until his death in 2004 remain at large.

A knowledgeable but bloated biography of one of the biggest names in science.