Sixty years ago this week, one of the greatest British scientists, Francis Crick, gave a lecture in London in which he accurately predicted how genes work, setting the course for the genetic revolution we are now living through. Here, evolutionary biologist Professor Matthew Cobb from Manchester University unpicks the predictions that set a new course for how we understand the very stuff we are made from.
In one lecture, it has been said that Francis Crick "permanently altered the logic of biology".
Only four years earlier, he and the young American Jim Watson had solved the double helix structure of DNA, using data gathered by Rosalind Franklin. Aged 41, Crick was still five years away from winning the Nobel Prize for this work, but he had a reputation as a powerful and profound thinker.
He gave his lecture - "On protein synthesis" - at University College London for the Society for Experimental Biology. In it, Crick spoke about how genes do what they do. At the time, this subject was still very murky - some scientists were not even convinced that genes were made of DNA.
But Crick delivered four predictions about genes - and their link to the proteins that build our bodies. In each of these ideas, he was right.=READ MORE
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