The Legacy of Francis Crick

I think few people are oblivious to what Francis Crick accomplished and the fact that he passed away this summer, after a lengthy illness.
The last issue of Nature offered an extended obituary that not only bears witness to a great man and a great scientist, but also lent its support to the idea that science is going downhill nowadays .. or pretty much every day since Crick’s heydays. This is of course a view that Nature has held for some time now and anyone with even the slightest insights into the ways of the modern world and a smidgen of common sense is bound to concur. The funny thing is that this fact is passing most people by like smoke in the wind. For various reasons they do not see or choose not to see the ailment of modern science.

One of the most striking facts about Crick’s scientific life was that he never accepted any PhD or postdoctoral students. In other words, he didn’t quite fit into the box that is contemporary science. And not only that but he always wrestled the big issues. Asked the seemingly impossible questions. Never settling for anything less. Unless just about every modern student of so called science, like workers at an assembly line, doing their part but understanding little about the grand scheme of things. And surely never solving anything beyond their limited scope. Of course, in one way this is all but inevitable, any system needs workers to pull the heavy load and do the dull things.

But the problem is that in this system everyone is a baseline worker. And everyone entering the system can only do so by subjecting to the rules of the game. Thus, no Cricks can arise anno 2004. They would either be molded by or spat out of the system long before that. And considering that Crick himself was a “field skipper”, moving from one discipline to another (probably the source of this greatness), it is reasonable to assume that Crick would have been a pariah of the scientific community had he started his career today. Without funding or liaisons. Lets face it, in many ways scientists today are pretty small minded. No one likes a physicist working with biology. Mainly so because there are already plenty of people working in biology, more than is actually required, and settling in an already overpopulated area is not easy.

So, all in all, science has become a job just like any other. Scarce of truly free thinking, funding, big ideas and the desire to revolutionize.