Francis Crick (1916 - 2004)
Francis Crick (1916 - 2004) won the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1962 along with James D. Watson and Maurice Wilkins "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material". Crick enjoyed science from an early age and went on to study physics at university, however after the second World War, which saw him designing mines for the Admiralty Mining Establishments, he began to study biology and moved to Cambridge. He was interested in the fundamental question of biology - how molecules make the transition from the non-living to the living - at a time when it was still unknown that DNA was the genetic material. In 1953, after studying X-Ray crystallographs of DNA, he and James Watson published a paper in the journal Nature describing their discovery of a structure for the molecule which contained "a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material".
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