Francis Crick was a restless, relentless thinker, as fascinated by Beat poetry and psychedelics as the genetic meaning of life and the inner workings of the brain. Yet for all his drive, he was driven by collaboration: with Jim Watson on DNA, with artists in Cambridge and California, and with his wife Odile, who drew the figure of the double helix that illuminated his most famous discovery. It was his debates and conflicts with these collaborators that powered a mind in motion.
Meticulously researched and shot through with insight and electrifying detail, Matthew Cobb reveals the man who changed our view of life forever. Crick is the first major biography of one of the twentieth century's most exciting minds.
Matthew Cobb is Professor of Zoology at the University of Manchester where his research focuses on the sense of smell, insect behaviour and the history of science. His books include The Idea of the Brain, The Egg and Sperm Race, and acclaimed accounts of the French Resistance during the Second World War and the liberation of Paris in 1944.