The English molecular biologist Francis Harry Compton Crick (born 1916) contributed to the establishment of the double-helical model of the DNA molecule.

Francis Crick was born June 8, 1916, in Northampton, England. At University College, London, he studied physics and mathematics and obtained his degree in 1937. Work on an advanced degree was halted by the coming of World War II, when Crick had to shift his interest from pure science to the design and production of magnetic mines. By the time the war ended, he had decided to pursue a career in biology, not physics. His decision was influenced by a reading of the book What Is Life" by physicist Erwin Schrödinger, with its message that an intensive investigation of the gene was likely to reveal the nature of life.

Crick began his study of biology at Strangeways Laboratory, Cambridge, in 1947, but within 2 years he left to join the...