Matthew on the subject of his latest book: Francis Crick

As I’ve mentioned several times, Matthew has written what is the definitive biography of Francis Crick, one of the great polymaths of our time. It comes out in the first two weeks of November.

Today you can see an article that Matthew about the book for the Observor, but he and I both urge you to buy the book itself (the publisher’s site is here, a U.K. purchasing site is here, and the U.S. Hachette site, here, gives a 20% discount with the code CRICK20.

Click the headline to read the article for free:

But what is this about poetry?  Here are a few excerpts from the article.

n 1947, aged 31 and with his career in physics derailed by the war, Francis Crick, the future co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, returned to research, focusing on two fundamental biological problems: life and the brain. Over the following half century, he made decisive contributions to both these fields, becoming one of the most significant thinkers of the 20th century. In 1994, the Times hailed Crick as the “genius of our age”, comparing him to Isaac Newton, Mozart and Shakespeare, while after his death in 2004, parallels were drawn with Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel.

Like Darwin, Mendel and Newton, Crick changed how the rest of us see the world. He drew out the implications of DNA structure, developed new ways of understanding life and evolution, and later convinced neuroscientists to adopt computational and molecular approaches, and to study the nature of consciousness.

Crick’s aim was not just to make discoveries about two fundamental scientific riddles; he also wanted to replace the superstitious and religious ideas that marked these questions. This did not mean he was stuffy or unimaginative – he was fascinated by the flux of perception and emotion he found in poetry, particularly the work of psychedelic Beat poet Michael McClure, who became a close friend. Poetry and science co-existed in his approach to the world.

Once, when I met with Jim Watson during one of his yearly visits to Chicago, he told me that part of the motivation for his and Crick’s attempt to find the structure of DNA was to confirm materialism (aka atheism): they wanted to show, as Watson told me, that the “secret of life” was a molecule that, in the right milieu, could produce a whole organism. More excerpts:

Crick’s scientific achievements have recently tended to be reduced to those few weeks in Cambridge in February 1953, when he and James Watson discovered the structure of DNA. The widely believed story that they stole the data of King’s College London researcher Rosalind Franklin is untrue: Watson and Crick knew of Franklin’s results and those of Crick’s close friend Maurice Wilkins, but they did not provide any decisive insight into the structure of DNA. Franklin knew that the pair had access to her data and bore no grudge; she soon became friendly with both men, and was particularly close to Crick and his wife, Odile.

Watson and Crick subsequently explained that had they not found the structure, then Franklin, or her colleague Wilkins, or someone else, would have done so – it was inevitable. Crick and Watson succeeded because they were lucky, smart, somewhat unscrupulous, and determined

And the poetry:

This sense of beauty, of deep relationships underlying complex phenomena, drove Crick’s scientific work and was linked to his fascination with poetry. As he explained:

But here I disagree with Crick:

Although Crick admired the works of WB Yeats and TS Eliot, by the mid-1960s he had fallen out of love with them because of their mystical views. As he explained in a letter to his friend, the novelist CP Snow, he felt “you can’t be a major poet without a solid foundation of silly ideas (almost everybody thinks Yeats’s ideas silly but to me Eliot’s are just as bad)”.

Yes, Yeats was a mystic, which of course is antiscientific, but both he and Eliot wrote poetry that was non-mystical (think of Yeat’s gorgeous “The Lake Isle of Innisfree“, or Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock“).

. . .That Crick’s otherwise penetrating mind never challenged his old prejudices and could not master political issues highlights that he was not a flawless hero nor – no matter what graffiti in 1960s Cambridge proclaimed – a candidate for the post of God. Instead, he was an extraordinarily clever man with limits to his interests and perception.

Crick’s withdrawal from cultural debates coincided with a series of shifts in his world. He and Odile moved from Cambridge to California, where he worked on neuroscience and consciousness at the Salk Institute in San Diego.

In his 50s, Crick used LSD and cannabis and became fascinated by Michael McClure’s materialist psychedelic poetry, which he admired for what he described as its fury and imagery and for its open embrace of biology: “When a man does not admit that he is an animal, he is less than an animal,” proclaimed McClure. Crick’s friendship with McClure ran through the second half of his life, and he did not see it as being in contradiction with his scientific views.

. . .In 2004, on the day that Crick died after a long illness, McClure completed what he described as his finest poem, dedicated to Crick. Full of the muscular sensation and vivid imagery that Crick appreciated, one stanza seems to represent McClure’s attempt to grapple with his friend’s inevitable end:

PERHAPS WE RETURN TO A POOL

– STEADY AND SOLID;

ready and already completed in fireworks

and lives and non-lives – thin and faint

as powerful odours stirring

my moment’s soul in the mind of place.

Below is a photo of Crick from Wikipedia with the caption, “Francis Crick in his office. Behind him is a model of the human brain that he inherited from Jacob Bronowski.”