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Francis Harry Compton Crick OM FRS (8 June 1916 - 28 July 2004), (Ph.D., Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, 1953) was an English molecular biologist, physicist, and neuroscientist, who is most noted for being one of the co-discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. He, James D. Watson, and Maurice Wilkins were jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material". His later work, until 1977, at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, has not received as much formal recognition. Crick is widely known for use of the term “central dogma” to summarize an idea that genetic information flow in cells is essentially one-way, from DNA to RNA to protein. Crick was an important theoretical molecular biologist and played an important role in research related to revealing the genetic code. During the remainder of his career, he held the post of J.W. Kieckhefer Distinguished Research Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. His later research centered on theoretical neurobiology and attempts to advance the scientific study of human consciousness. He remained in this post until his death; "he was editing a manuscript on his death bed, a scientist until the bitter end" said his close associate Christof Koch .
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