a peek into the remarkable mind behind the genetic code chapter 2...

A Peek into the Remarkable Mind Behind

the Genetic Code

Chapter 2

遗传密码背后的杰出智慧一瞥

Francis Crick is associated with two discoveries, probably two of the most important in the 20th century: the double helix of DNA and the genetic code. The first he discovered with James Watson; the second he worked out mostly by himself, though with contributions from many others. The first biography of Crick, who died in 2004 at the age of 88, has now appeared. Called Francis Crick, Discoverer of the Genetic Code, it is by Matt Ridley, one of the few journalists Crick was in the habit of talking with. Mr. Ridley has created a vivid portrait that explains Crick’s scientific work with clarity, deftly outlines his career and provides sharp insights into the nature of Crick’s remarkable creativity.

A Peek into the Remarkable Mind Behind the Genetic Code

One source of new material developed by Mr. Ridley concerns Crick’s wartime career in the British Admiralty. Trained as a physicist, Crick worked on magnetic and acoustic mines and mine countermeasures.

Rejecting a promising career in military physics after the war, Crick was influenced by two friends, the Austrian mathematician Georg Kreisel and the physicist Maurice Wilkins, to begin a new career in biological research.

As Mr. Ridley notes, Crick was in middle age when he embarked on his career of scientific discovery, in contrast with the many scientists who make their marks when young. Crick forged his own path through life. Mr. Ridley dwells only briefly on Crick’s heterodox views and experimental way of life. He seldom read newspapers, because working in intelligence had convinced him that most stories never reached the press.


magnetic and acoustic mine 音响磁性水雷

intelligence: 情报；谍报 ; 情报机构

Intelligence agent / bureau 情报员 / 情报局新闻界；出版社；出版界；通讯社

出人头地 , 扬名立万

Crick refused to meet the queen when she visited Cambridge’s new Laboratory of Molecular Biology because he disapproved of royalty, and he declined a knighthood. He deeply disliked religion, saying once that Christianity was all right between consenting adults but should not be taught to children.

Desire to undercut religious obscurantism was a cogent motive in Crick’s scientific career, shaping his choice first of the gene and later of consciousness as problems that, if cracked, would destroy the last refuges of vitalism.


consenting adult (s) : somebody who is old enough to be allowed to participate legally in something and is willing to do so, especially in a sexual activitygay guy (s) （男同性恋者） lesbian (s) （女同性恋者）

Vitalism: “ 生机论”也称“活力论”，从古希腊时期到18 世纪，一直在欧洲盛行。“生机论”认为生命由躯体和灵魂两部分组成的。具体说来，生命是由没有生命的物质加上一种超自然的神秘力量而获得的。这种神秘力量被称为“活力”，正是因为它存在于生物体内，从而把生物与非生物区别开来，它控制着生命的全部活动和特征。宗教利用该理论麻痹和愚弄人民 , 宣扬“生命神创”、“灵魂是不死的”等迷信思想，

Throughout, he stayed true to himself: ebullient, loquacious, charming, skeptical, tenacious. He would have liked to find the seat of consciousness and to see the retreat of religion. He had to settle for explaining life.

An unusual aspect of Crick’s work habits was that his thinking was forged in the challenge of argument. This required a constant interlocutor or intellectual sparring partner. Mr. Kreisel, the mathematician, was the first holder of this unusual position, followed by Watson for the discovery of the double helix, Sydney Brenner for the work on the genetic code, and Christof Koch for the study of the brain and consciousness.


settle for: 满足于…；将就；容忍 ;

He demanded a hundred dollars but had to settle for halt that amount.

Another feature of Crick’s mind was that he excelled in being able to visualize the physical relationship of objects. He could intuitively imagine in his mind’s eye the space-group symmetry of a crystal’s unit cell, meaning how far it must be rotated to look the same again. A glance at Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray photos of DNA told him what she had not grasped, that the two parallel chains of the DNA double helix must run in opposite directions.


晶胞空间群对称

Another special feature of his approach to science was the difficult balance he always maintained between theory and empiricism. He tried every possible theoretical approach to the problem of how the 60 possibilities allowed by a four base triplet genetic code might yield 20 kinds of amino acid but never trusted the answers, however elegant. That essential caution left him open to the empirical approach by which the code was finally broken.


遗传密码由核酸分子中四种碱基以三联体形式来表示。

Crick’s special ability to combine his intuitions with theoretical and empirical judgment was at its finest in his astonishingly prescient paper of 1958 on protein synthesis. In it he laid out the field’s several fundamental axioms, including that all proteins are composed of combinations of the same 20 amino acids, and that the linear order of amino acids determines the three-dimensional structure into which the protein is shaped. All these propositions were guesses. And all are correct.


Crick was slow to anger and quick to forgive. He was quite unreasonably furious at the Double Helix, Watson’s deep though gossipy account of their discovery. The reason, Mr. Ridley suggests, is that Crick saw himself as a dedicated seeker of great truths who had worked very hard, with long hours of reading, calculation, and intuition, to get to the point where he could make a great discovery; yet the world would now learn about the quest as if it had been just another soap opera.


In 1968, Watson published his DNA discovery and entitled it The Double Helix. The book became a best-seller, but some members of the scientific community were outraged by his degrading portrayal ( 描写） of his colleagues. Through the controversy, Watson said that sticking to the truth was important in writing for scientific research. Because of The Double Helix and their contributions to science, Watson, Crick and Wilkins were all awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962.

《双螺旋 --发现 DNA结构的故事》

It would be unfair to criticize the author for making essentially the same judgments about Crick’s historical role as can be found in Mr. Judson’s book, for both are correct. Mr. Ridley’s contribution is that he has extracted from existing material a considerably more complete and colorful portrait of Crick than has existed before. And by deft narration and analysis, he has captured the wonder of an unparalleled scientific mind at work and at play.


• http://geneticcode.tougao.com 1. 《关于 Crick 43 遗传密码表的质疑研究》 2. Crick 4*4*4 遗传密码表存在的连续性错误 ( 2006-9-19 12:27:30 )3.Crick 4*4*4 遗传密码表是完全错误的 (2005-12-09 04:03:23 )4. 纠正 Crick 4*4*4 遗传密码表错误的意义 (2006-9-19 12:27:22 ) 杨星阳

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a peek into the remarkable mind behind the genetic code chapter 2...

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