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by: Matt Ridley  List Price: $19.95 Amazon.com's Price: $13.57 You Save: $6.38 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Binding: HardcoverDewey Decimal Number: 576.5092 EAN: 9780060823337 ISBN: 006082333X Label: Eminent Lives Manufacturer: Eminent Lives Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 224 Publication Date: June 01, 2006 Publisher: Eminent Lives Release Date: June 13, 2006 Studio: Eminent Lives Related Items:
Browse for similar items by category: Click to Display Editorial Review: Amazon.com Review: Francis Crick, who died at the age of eighty-eight in 2004, will be bracketed with Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein as one of the great scientists of all time. Between 1953 and 1966 he made and led a revolution in biology by discovering, quite literally, the secret of life: the digital cipher at the heart of heredity that distinguishes living from non-living things--the genetic code. His own discoveries--though he always worked with one other partner and did much of his thinking in conversation--include not only the double helix but the whole mechanism of protein synthesis, the three-letter nature of the code, and much of the code itself. Matt Ridley's biography traces Crick's life from middle-class mediocrity in the English Midlands, through a lackluster education and six years designing magnetic mines for the Royal Navy, to his leap into biology at the age of thirty-one. While at Cambridge, he suddenly began to display the unique visual imagination and intense tenacity of thought that would allow him to see the solutions to several great scientific conundrums--and to see them long before most biologists had even conceived of the problems. Having set out to determine what makes living creatures alive and having succeeded, he immigrated at age sixty to California and turned his attention to the second question that had fascinated him since his youth: What makes conscious creatures conscious? Time ran out before he could find the answer. Discover More Eminent Lives
Average Rating:
 Rating:  - good readThis is a very interesting and highly readable book, but a little gushing especially towards the end. I felt the author believed that because Crick's work on the double helix and the three-letter code was so very important, that everything Crick said or thought was equally remarkable. Some of his later ideas, such as directed panspermia, were not really scientific in the sense of being testable. If he were not one of the greats these ideas might have been dismissed as arm-waving. Rating:  - A review of the title (bad)While the author got Crick's name right, he dropped the ball on the rest of the title. Crick did not discover the genetic code. Marshall Nirenberg did. Crick and Watson figured out the structure of the DNA molecule. There is a difference between elucidating the structure of DNA and working out the code embodied in that structure. Hopefully the author makes the distinction in the text. I have not read the book. This is just a review of the title, which gets a "2", on the strength of spelling Crick's ... Read More Rating: - A Life Devoted to the IntellectI was heartened to read in this book that Francis Crick steadfastly refused to accept honorary degrees and other such dubious signs of distinction that academics like to bestow on one another. Of course Crick received the Nobel prize, so it was easy for him to snub his nose at the honor-grubbing of his lesser colleagues. Still, his behavior in this area is exemplary, and reassuring. While I got this glimpse of Crick's personality, I did not learn as much as I had hoped about DNA. That ... Read More Rating: - Finally!! A biography of the 20TH century's most important biologist+++++ This book, by professor and author Matt Ridley, succinctly tells the life story of Dr. Francis Crick (1916 to 2004), perhaps best known for discovering, along with Dr. James Watson, the structure of DNA. (Ridley tells us that "I first met Francis Crick through my wife [a professor], who worked with him in 1985.") Roughly, this book can be divided into five parts: (1) Crick's early years (2) His discovery, along with Watson, of the double helical structure ... Read More Rating:  - The laughing giantIf anything typified Francis Crick's work style, it was his quest for cooperation. The "Watson-Crick" team has so dominated the literature of DNA research, that a view of Crick as an individual is a rare sight. Matt Ridley has admirably filled in that lack with this view of the Nobel Laureate's life. In a brief, but insightful, and superbly written account, the biographer has filled in many details of a scientist, a theoriser and, most significantly, a man of unquenchable curiosity. If any one ... Read More 
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