Matthew’s biography of Francis Crick gets a glowing review in Nature

Matthew’s new biography of Francis Crick is the third one published, but, according to this glowing review in Nature, is by far the best of the lot. I’ve read a lot of it in draft and, while I can’t compare it to the other two, I can tell you that Matthew’s is worth buying and reading, and you don’t have to be a biologist to understand it. Just have a gander at the final assessment of reviewer Georgina Ferry:

Of Crick’s three biographers, Cobb comes closest to making the case that Crick belongs in the scientific pantheon alongside Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, arguing that “Crick’s thinking changed how the rest of us see the world”. Ridley’s book (Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code, 2006) is an entertaining primer but brief, unreferenced and unindexed. In his authorized biography Francis Crick: Hunter of Life’s Secrets (2009), Olby is as thorough as Cobb but perhaps more reverent, glancing coyly at Crick’s preoccupations with drugs and sex, whereas Cobb makes them essential accessories to his intellectual pursuits.

Ferry’s review (click on headline below to read, or find it archived here) occupies nearly three pages of the journal—the longest book review I’ve seen in Nature.  That alone tells you of the book’s importance. Matthew must be chuffed (in fact, he told me so), and the only other review he needs now is a good one in the New York Times. I hope they’re reviewing it, for Crick was one of the greatest scientists of our era, and the NYT often pays scant attention to science books.

Click to read the review. And yes, there are drugs and sex.

Crick is best known to the layperson as the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA with J. D. Watson, but he did far more, including hypothesizing the existence of a three-base code for amino acids, of messenger RNA to carry the code into the cytoplasm to make proteins, and formulizing the “central dogma,” best characterized as “information can go from DNA to protein, but information cannot get from the protein back to the genetic material.”

Now Crick, like his contemporary polymath J. D. “Sage” Bernal, was no saint, at least if you expect Crick to be a saint. He was a complex human being and that complexity, including affairs and drug-laced parties, is part of Crick’s life. But it can also be seen as instantiating the same tendencies that helped make his career: his need to interact with others and his desire to open the “doors of perception” when he worked on consciousness at the end of his career.

Let me give just a few quotes from the review. I tell you, had I written this book I’d be popping champagne corks today:

In a magisterial new biography, Crick, zoologist and historian Matthew Cobb revisits the double-helix breakthrough, a discovery he discussed in forensic detail in his book Life’s Greatest Secret (2015). Yet, this time, the publication of the structure and the immediate aftermath of the discovery occupy just 41 pages. Instead, Cobb explores how Crick’s thinking, writing and interactions with others transcended that brilliant, yet contested, episode, revolutionizing molecular biology and influencing evolutionary and developmental biology, visual neuroscience and ideas about consciousness.

At the same time, he makes a more sustained attempt than either of Crick’s previous biographers (Matt Ridley and Robert Olby) to answer several questions. Who was Crick? What kind of person was he? What did he care about?

Crick was notoriously reluctant to divulge personal information or even have his photograph taken. Combing through a remarkably comprehensive set of personal and professional archives with meticulous attention to detail, Cobb has reconstructed Crick’s relationships with those who were essential crew mates on his intellectual odyssey.

People will of course be curious about the Rosalind Franklin episode in the elucidation of DNA’s structure, though the whole DNA-structure narrative occupies only about 40 pages in the book. Matthew’s view is outlined below, and I believe he’s written on this site that Franklin should have gotten the  Chemistry Nobel Prize with Wilkins, but she died of ovarian cancer before the Prize was awarded (they’re not given posthumously).

Cobb presents the double-helix story as much more of a collaboration with chemist Rosalind Franklin and biophysicist Maurice Wilkins at King’s College London than Crick and Watson acknowledged in their iconic 1953 paper (J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick Nature171, 737–738; 1953). He exonerates Crick and Watson of theft, but not of bad manners. “They should have requested permission to use the data,” Cobb writes. “They did not.”

The elucidation of the triplet code and the mechanism for translating it into proteins was done by Crick in association with Sydney Brenner, who won his own Nobel Prize much later: 2002. And this collaboration brings up some of the “unsaintly” behavior of Crick. From the review:

These landmark findings involved numerous experiments overseen by Brenner’s highly skilled research assistant, Leslie Barnett; Crick himself was notoriously clumsy in the laboratory. Cobb acknowledges her “vital” role but we learn nothing about her as a person. Various long-suffering secretaries also appear fleetingly: they formed part of Crick’s essential support system, some became close friends, and it would have been good to hear more of their voices (and perhaps less of Kreisel’s). As for the lovers, they drift by like ghosts: noted, occasionally quoted, but not identified. “Not our business”, says Cobb.

After this period, Crick was fruitlessly distracted by problems of development and the origin of life, going “off the rails” according to the reviewer. But then he found his footing again when he moved to the Salk Institute in 1977 and began working on consciousness.

. . for the rest of his life focused mainly on tackling the second of the two problems that he had identified at the outset of his career: the basis of human consciousness. Homing in on the question of how humans experience the visual world, he once again became a brilliant influencer and synthesizer of ideas from both neuroscience and machine learning. His 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis argued that all conscious experience stems from brain activity and nothing else; however, it fell short of explaining how. Although this theory was not particularly astonishing to most neuroscientists, it made an enormous public impact.

Well, Crick was certainly right about that: where else could consciousness come from unless it’s some supernatural phenomenon that is outside the ambit of physics. Yet the neurological basis of consciousness is still contested by both scientists (included the deluded “panpsychists” who think that everything in the Universe is conscious) and by laypeople who haven’t thought about the problem. The problem, of course, is connected with determinism, and Crick was certainly a determinist. As I’ve written elsewhere, J. D. Watson told me that he and Crick were motivated to find the structure of DNA partly to demonstrate that the “secret of life” had a purely chemical and materialistic basis.

Here’s the final paragraph of the review: the cherry on the sundae:

Cobb is reliably excellent in maintaining the narrative momentum of a life in science that was anything but mundane. His gripping and accessible account is generous while calling out flaws as he sees them, and discreet when that could hurt the feelings of living friends and relatives. What made Crick Crick, he argues, was his lifelong attempt to “chase the intellectual high” produced by flashes of unique insight. Crick was not, he concludes, a saint or a hero but “an extraordinarily clever man with limits to his interests and perception”.

Are you ready to read the book now? I hope so, and note that I get nothing out of blurbing it here. I do get an autographed copy, though, for having helped Matthew find a fact about baseball in the book (box scores are forever).

You can order the Crick bio from the UK by clicking on the screenshot of the British version below, or here if you’re in the US. And of course there’s always Amazon. The book comes out in three days in the UK and on November 11 in the U.S. (The UK cover is much better, but the contents are identical.)