Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code (Eminent Lives) - Hardcover

Ridley, Matt

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0007213301 ISBN 13: 9780007213306

Publisher: HarperPress, 2006

Synopsis

In the launch title of an exciting new series, acclaimed author Matt Ridley traces the colourful life of the man who discovered the structure of DNA, the building blocks of life.

Building on a biographical tradition that can be traced back to Aubrey's ‘Brief Lives’, Dr Johnson's ‘Lives of the Poets’ and Lytton Strachey's ‘Eminent Victorians’, this exciting and groundbreaking new series pairs great biographers, historians and novelists with iconic subjects, the writing bristling with original and distinctive points of view.

On 28 February 1953, Francis Crick walked into The Eagle pub in Cambridge and announced that he and his American colleague James Watson ‘had found the secret of life’. In fact, they had indeed done so. That morning, Crick and Watson had worked out the structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). They had discovered its 'double helix' form, one which could replicate itself, confirming theories that it carried life's hereditary information.

Matt Ridley's life of Crick begins with his birth in 1916 at the home of a shoe factory owner, his early explosive experiments at primary school and time developing torpedoes in the Navy. After his seismic genetic code discovery, which won him the Nobel Prize before he'd even gained a PhD, the scientist's later work was rarely uncontroversial. From California, he proposed that life began when micro-organisms from another planet were dropped here by a spaceship sent to Earth, and maintained that the 'human soul' was entirely explicable in terms of brain activity. Matt Ridley's entertaining account traces the colourful and entirely original work behind one of mankind's greatest discoveries and displays the life of a scientist considered to be of the very first rank.

About this title

About the Author

Matt Ridley received his BA and D. Phil at Oxford researching the evolution of behaviour. He has been science editor, Washington correspondent and American editor of 'The Economist'. He is the author of bestselling titles 'The Red Queen' (1993), 'The Origins of Virtue' (1996), 'Genome' (1999) and 'Nature via Nurture' (2003). His books have sold over half a million copies, been translated into 23 languages and been shortlisted for six literary prizes. In 2004 he won the National Academies Book Award from the US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. He is married to the neuroscientist Professor Anya Hurlbert.

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperPress
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0007213301
• ISBN 13: 9780007213306
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 213