Francis Crick is best known as a member of the team that received the Nobel Prize for their part in determining the structure of DNA. Seventy-two years after that discovery, it is still the main reason most prospective readers might be interested in this book. They will not be disappointed, even though, as Matthew Cobb makes clear, this was only the beginning of Crick’s scientific achievements. It does, however, provide the archetypal example of the way Crick worked. As Cobb puts it, Crick’s process was essentially collaborative and involved ‘asking fundamental questions and pursuing them through intense encounters with others’. It’s just unfortunate that some of his key ‘collaborators’ in the DNA story didn’t know that they were making a vital contribution to his success.

The version of that story presented here is a clear and comprehensive account of the not entirely ethical way that Crick and his collaborator James Watson used data obtained by Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling – without their knowledge – to come up with the idea of the double helix. But it is also clear that the Watson-Crick model was a leap worthy of a Nobel Prize. Franklin and Gosling had already suspected that DNA forms the structure of a double helix, but that is only half the story. Crick and Watson explained how the two strands of a DNA molecule are held together by weak forces called hydrogen bonds, and how this makes it possible for the strands to unravel and copy themselves.

When he made that leap, Crick was already thirty-six years old and had only recently started to work in molecular biology, partly because of the way his career had been disrupted by the war. Over the next twelve years, however, he more than made up for lost time. His major