PERSON
Francis Crick
The co-discoverer of DNA's double helix and tireless architect of the hypothesis that consciousness is nothing but the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells—the most consequential reductionist in the history of biology, and the involuntary philosopher of the machine age.
Francis Crick spent the first half of his career proving that the secret of life is a code, and the second half insisting that the secret of the mind is a circuit. In 1953, working with James Watson at Cambridge and drawing on the X-ray data of Rosalind Franklin, he helped reveal the double-helical structure of DNA—a molecule whose shape announced its own function at a glance. He then named the
central dogma of molecular biology, helped crack the genetic code, and at an age when most scientists write memoirs, turned to the brain and announced that you, your joys, your memories, and your sense of self are “no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells.” He called this the
astonishing hypothesis, and he chose the adjective with care: not because the claim was implausible to a neuroscientist, but because, if true, it dissolves the last refuge of human