THINKER

Vital signs

MATT RIDLEYunravels the humanist code of Francis Crick

Briefly, in the 1960s Francis Crick was as famous for his atheism as he was for his scientific achievements. The leading light of the Cambridge Humanists, he resigned from a fellowship of Churchill College in protest at the building of a new chapel, donated £100 for an essay competition on “What should be done with the college chapels?” and told Varsitymagazine: “I do not respect Christian beliefs. I think they are ridiculous.” Some of this made the national newspapers. It was not until 1968 that most of the world discovered just what else this opinionated don had achieved, when James Watson's book The Double Helixcame out, with its extraordinary story of how the unappreciated middle-aged Crick and the brash prodigy Watson had snatched the very secret of life from under the noses of more diligent scientists in London by their discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953. The book's famous opening sentence was “I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood” and it included the story of Crick announcing to fellow drinkers in the Eagle on the last day of February 1953: “We've discovered the secret of life”. But in the long view Francis Crick, who died in 2004 and whose biography I have just written, deserves his place in history for neither of these reasons. His role in the double helix story, though vital, was only auxiliary – it was Watson who made the running and the moment when arguments about atheism reached the national news soon passed. No, in my opinion Francis Crick was one of the great scientists not just of his time but of all time and this reputation rests on what he did after the double helix. Consider what was known in 1950 about the nature of life, and then what was known 20 years later in 1970. In 1950 scientists knew that living creatures were made of organic polymers, of which proteins seemed the most varied, and that creatures had objects in them whose

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properties could be very specifically copied – genes. But how genes copied themselves and how proteins were made were two separate, baffling enigmas. The first question was answered by the double helical structure of DNA – a structure so obviously designed to carry a linear code and copy itself that the conclusion virtually spoke for itself. It none the less took several years and numerous experiments before biochemists and geneticists were convinced, but to true believers like Crick there was never any doubt that they would be. The second question was the one on which Crick's great reputation is based. It is all very well saying that a gene can copy itself. But what does it do? What's a gene's job? To make proteins, said Crick and set out to prove how. That code running down the DNA backbone must be a code spelling out the sequence of amino acids in a protein, written in three-letter words and translated at ribosomes by a mechanism involving an “adaptor”, a molecule that can both read in DNA-ish and write in protein-ish. Crick set all this out in 1957 in a paper of sublime deduction and proved some of it himself with experiments of surpassing ingenuity. By 1966 it was all proved correct and the code itself had been cracked and set out in a format devised by Crick himself. Why do I say this was such a great scientific moment? Because it answered a really big question – what is life? – with a simple, beautiful and unexpected answer. Life is the use of linear digital codes to construct machinery that can cause eddies in the entropy stream. There is a universal genetic code, common to all living things, and what Crick called a central dogma (that nucleic

acid sequences determine protein sequences, not vice versa). And with that, all vitalism – the metaphysical notion that life is animated by some kind of extra physical “life force” – becomes unnecessary. Superstition had always hung about the subject of life like fog over a lake: life would surely prove to contain an enigma that could never be explained by physics, chemistry or even philosophy. Life was an essentially spiritual thing, not accessible to reductionism. Until 1950 that was at least a tenable idea. By 1970 it was utterly perverse to think in such a way. The mysterians fell back on the mysteries of consciousness, hotly pursued by Crick, who switched to neuroscience in the 1980s. Apart from the farther reaches of the organic farming movement, vitalism became essentially extinct. Indeed, Michael Crick, son of Francis, points out that the word is unrecognised in Microsoft's spellchecker – “Score one for Francis!”, he cried at his father’s memorial “service”. So Crick’s great achievement was of a piece with his humanism. He set out deliberately to topple a citadel of spiritual thinking, claiming its hinterland for rational inquiry, and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. His science both caused his atheism and was caused by it. “If some of the Bible is manifestly wrong,” he wrote in his memoirs, “Why should any of the rest of it be accepted automatically?” And “What would be more important than to find our true place in the universe by removing one of these unfortunate vestiges of early belief?” ■

Matt Ridley delivers the Darwin Day lecture Francis Crick the Darwin of the 20th Century?on February 12 Piss,shit and blood In laying bare the entrails of 18th-century society,claims MARTIN ROWSON,Hogarth was the first modern journalist

Above: Detail from The Reward of Cruelty, 1750/1

Hogarthian is an adjective which William Hogarth, ruthlessly ambitious and with a highly self-conscious awareness of how he personally encapsulated all the English virtues, would doubtless have been delighted to bequeath to the English language. It’s an interesting adjective too. In his book The Fatal Shore, describing the city from which the first white Australians were transported, Robert Hughes summed it up rather well: “Modern squalor is squalid yet Georgian squalor is ‘Hogarthian’, an art form in itself.” Without quite knowing why, we all recognise what it implies: an earthy, vicious yet also rather jolly rumbustiousness, neatly summing up all we think we understand by the 18th century. For instance, we instantly recognise the difference between what is meant by “Hogarthian” and “Dickensian”

London. The latter is filthy, crimeridden, sentimental, pitiful but also, once we’ve recognised its hideous nature, reformable and consequently redeemable; the former, on the other hand, while being filthy and crime-ridden and occasionally sentimental, is depicted without pity, without hope of redemption, and is therefore, in its cynical slapstick, much, much funnier. That this isn’t quite what Hogarth intended is very much beside the point. That said, Hogarth himself was familiar with the squalor. He was born and raised in Clerkenwell (where one of his father’s many failed enterprises was a coffee house where the patrons were only allowed to converse in Latin). He lived close by the Fleet Ditch, the open sewer flowing from Smithfield, then still a livestock market where they did the butchering in situ, down towards the Thames where Blackfriars Bridge now stands. Its stinking course acted as a kind of natural barrier between the printers and lawyers to the west and the merchants in the City, and also endures as a metaphor for “Hogarthian” London (until it was covered by Farringdon Road in the 19th century), well before Hogarth started to depict the

city. This is Jonathan Swift in “A Description of a City Shower”: “Sweepings from butchers stalls, dung, guts and blood, Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, Dead cats and turnip-tops come tumbling down the flood.” Again, as with so much of Hogarth’s dark art, mixed in with the squalor there’s something intrinsically if indefinably funny about those lines. Sadly, Swift and Hogarth never worked together in a kind of 18th century pre-echo of Hunter S Thompson and Ralph Steadman, but the connection between the two is obvious. They were both central to the blossoming of satire in the half century after the Glorious Revolution and both had no compunction in describing, visually or verbally, all the shit and piss and blood endlessly flowing in the gutters alongside the Enlightenment, as well as the venality, stupidity and vanity strutting through and around them. The great 20th-century political cartoonist Sir David Low described Hogarth as “the grandfather of the political cartoon”.

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