What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery.

CRICK, Francis.

Item Number: 96547

New York: Basic Books, 1988.

First edition of Crick’s autobiography. Octavo, original cloth, illustrated. Boldly signed by Francis Crick on the title page. Near fine in a near fine price-clipped dust jacket.

"The man who is widely acknowledged to be the best biologist since Darwin, the co-discoverer of DNA, tells his side of the story in this widely-praised memoir" (Sloan Foundation Science Series). Crick's co-discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA (for which he shared a Nobel Prize with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins) was a maddening pursuit beset with false ideas, sloppy models, inconclusive results and fiascos. This will not come as news to readers of Watson's 1968 bestseller The Double Helix. Part memoir, part scientific primer, Crick's gracefully written reminiscence is more concerned with elucidating the intuitive leaps, feats of intellectual courage and perceptual skills that underlie the act of scientific discovery. Writing about his own career with uncommon modesty, he describes his current research into human consciousness and neuroanatomy; brain science of the 1980s, he concludes, is much like molecular biology of the '30s: the major questions remain largely unanswered.