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Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code (Eminent Lives) (rough edge)
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by Matt Ridley
Sales Rank: 75596
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List Price: $19.95
$13.57
At Amazon
on 9-11-2008
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Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Eminent Lives June 13, 2006
Language: English
ISBN-10: 006082333X
ISBN-13: 978-0060823337
Product Dimensions:
7.2 x 5.3 x 1 inches
Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
Product 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.
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From Publishers Weekly
Francis Crick (1916–2004) is a natural addition to the Eminent Lives series. Best known for his codiscovery of the structure of DNA alongside James Watson, Crick is a canonical figure in modern science; award-winning British science writer Ridley (The Agile Gene) is an expert and distinguished author of popular books on biological science. But one wishes the strictures of this series gave Ridley more space in which to work; the prose is crisp and forthright, but he barely has enough room to recount the basic contours of Crick's voracious scientific career, leaving the reader with but a few fleeting glimpses of the man's deeper character. Readers of Watson's The Double Helix who pick up this book looking for a similarly idiosyncratic portrait of a scientific life will be disappointed, but one might argue that this spare, straightforward volume is a more fitting tribute to a scientist who lived a relatively modest public life while striving to understand the basic workings of life and consciousness. (June 1)
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Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code (Eminent Lives) (rough edge)
Available from Amazon
Price: $13.57
Updated on 9-11-2008
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