What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery by Francis Crick (PDF)

Description

Candid, provocative, and disarming, this is the widely-praised memoir of the co-discoverer of the double helix of DNA.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: From Publishers Weekly Crick’s co-discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA (for which he shared a Nobel Prize with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins) was a maddening pursuit beset with false ideas, sloppy models, inconclusive results and fiascos. This will not come as news to readers of Watson’s 1968 bestseller The Double Helix. Part memoir, part scientific primer, Crick’s gracefully written reminiscence is more concerned with elucidating the intuitive leaps, feats of intellectual courage and perceptual skills that underlie the act of scientific discovery. Writing about his own career with uncommon modesty, he describes his current research into human consciousness and neuroanatomy; brain science of the 1980s, he concludes, is much like molecular biology of the ’30s: the major questions remain largely unanswered. One wishes Crick were less reticent about his personal life. His occasional technical forays here into natural selection, the deciphering of the genetic code and theories of perception illuminate how science works. Illustrations. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. From School Library Journal YA Crick and Jim Watson received the 1962 Nobel Prize for their discovery of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. Here, Crick details his early training as a physicist; explains how he came to be at Cambridge studying X-ray crystallography; and shows his great respect for other scientists such as Linus Pauling, Sir Lawrence Bragg, Max Perutz, and Sidney Brenner. The writing is clear and straightforward, even when the renderings become technical. The appendixes elaborate further on the detailed biochemistry of the subject. Crick relates both the problems and the successes that he and Watson incurred in their “mad pursuit” of the mysteries within the DNA molecule. He concludes this volume with a discussion of his work at the Salk Institute in California. A shorter version of Crick’s life and work appears in Lewis Wolpert and Alison Richards’ Passion for Science (Oxford, 1988), but the longer version will be of interest to more persistent students.Robyn Cook Schuster, Episcopal High School, Bellaire, Tex.Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This Crick guy found a cute molecule that happens to be at the very core of all life forms. What an exciting pursuit! Here, he shares the whole adventure + a bit of himself. Such an intense and witty person even testing the peer-review process using a reference to “Leonardo Da Vinci (personal communication)”. You will find many fun anecdotes + details of the reasoning behind the discovery.

⭐This book is more about Francis Crick than the discovery of the structure of DNA, I guess. It don’t matter. For a non-biologist like me, the chapters about his life, the parties and stuff provide some time to breathe between the technical aspects of his scientific endeavour. It’s also fun how straightforward and impatient he is with gibberish from other scientists. And that’s what I wanted to read about: how a brilliant scientist thinks.

⭐Arrived on time and as described

⭐A great read. You get an opportunity to glimpse how a great scientific mind thinks and how the person lived.

⭐clarifies the role of natural selection ln evolution

⭐A must read if you want to understand how the DNA structure was discovered.

⭐Excellent

⭐Francis Crick (1916-2004) was a British molecular biologist, physicist, and neuroscientist, who was jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. In later years, Crick had been exploring more “philosophical” areas of science (see his books such as

⭐).He wrote in the Introduction to this 1988 book, “The main purpose of this book is to set out some of my experiences before and during the classical period of molecular biology…There is an important difference between the scientific work described in the main body of the book and that touched on in the epilogue… many of my remarks in the epilogue are a matter of opinion. My comments in the main body of the book have somewhat more authority… I have written both for my fellow scientists and for the general public… The most important theme of the book is natural selection… Biological replication… is nothing like … physics or in related disciplines. That is one reason why, to some people, biological organisms appear infinitely improbable.”He notes, “isomorphous replacement … had already been used successfully to help solve the structure of small molecules… I had told John Kendrew the sort of thing I intended to say and asked him what I should call it. ‘Why not,’ he said, ‘call it, “What Mad Pursuit”?’ (a quotation from Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’)—which I did.” (Pg. 50)He recalls, “The problem of finding a solution having twenty sense triplets is actually not an especially difficult one… I was booked on a night flight from the States to England. Waiting to board I found myself chatting to Fred Hoyle, the cosmologist… I explained to him the idea of the comma-free code. The next morning, as the plane approached the English coast, he came back to where I was sitting with a solution he had worked out overnight. Naturally, Orgel, Griffith, and I were excited by the idea of a comma-free code. It seemed to pretty, almost elegant… Without more ado we wrote it up for the RNA Tie Club. Nevertheless I was hesitant. I realized that we had not OTHER evidence for the code, other than the striking emergence of the number twenty. But then if some other number had come up we would have discarded the idea and looked around for some other code that led to twenty amino acids, so the number twenty by itself was not confirmatory evidence.” (Pg. 99-100)He explains, “I also wrote a scientific book, for lay readers, on the origin of life. Leslie Orgel and I… had hit upon the idea that perhaps life on Earth originated from microorganisms sent here, on an unmanned spaceship, by a higher civilization elsewhere… We called our idea ‘directed panspermia.’ … The object of my book was not to solve the problem of life’s origins but to convey some idea of the many kinds of science involved in the problem. I myself had a rather detached view of directed panspermia—I still have—and there was even a passage in the book saying … why our theory, though not unprovable, was obviously very speculative. The book… was entitled ‘Life Itself.’ While I considered this title rather too board for the contents, the publisher insisted on it.” (Pg. 148)He concludes, “The present state of the brain sciences reminds me of the state of molecular biology and embryology in, say, the 1920s and 1930s. Many interesting things have been discovered… but the major questions are still largely unanswered and are unlikely to be without new techniques and new ideas… The brain sciences still have a very long way to go, but the fascination of the subject and the importance of the answers will inevitably carry it forward. It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.” (Pg. 163)This book will be of keen interest to those concerned with the development of Crick’s thought, and should spur an interest in his later books.

⭐Francis Crick was the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA which won him (along with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins) the Nobel prize of 1962. This book describes Crick’s early life, what let him to research in biology, the story of his discovery and his later years in research. Crick was trained in physics and took up research in biology in his thirties. The book is filled with great advice on how to do scientific research. Must read for anyone interested in science.

⭐This is a very nice book mixing autobiographical parts (including a delicious story about Lawrence Bragg as an anonymous gardener) with a thrilling and very well constructed description of the discovery of the DNA molecular structure by Watson and Crick. Sure, molecular biology had very important developments since the book was written, but it is still a very clear and “first hands” account on the structure of the genetic code.

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