II.

Early Education and Research

Francis Harry Compton Crick was born in Northampton, England. His father owned a footwear factory and encouraged Crick’s early interest in scientific experiments. Crick attended the local grammar school and won a scholarship to Mill Hill School in North London at the age of 14. At University College, London, he studied physics. After graduation in 1937, Crick briefly pursued his doctoral degree studying the properties of water under high temperatures and pressures. His studies were interrupted by World War II (1939-1945), during which Crick worked for the scientific service of the British Admiralty, helping to design magnetic and acoustic mines.

After World War II, Crick decided his interests lay in biology. There were two general areas he wished to pursue: what he later described as “the borderline between the living and nonliving” and neurobiology. He decided to initially concentrate on the first goal, studying the chemical components that form the basis of living things. Thus, in 1947 he returned to school to study biology at the Strangeways Research Laboratory at Cambridge University.