Francis Harry Compton Crick, a British biophysicist who worked to discover the structure of the DNA molecule, was born on June 8, 1916 in Northampton, England. He is the elder child of Harry Crick and Annie Elizabeth Wilkins. Crick has one younger brother, A. F. Crick who is a doctor. He went to school at Northampton Grammar School and then Mill Hill School in London. While Crick attended University College in London, he studied physics and received a B. Sc. in 1937. With the guidance of Prof. E. N. da C. Androde, Crick began research for his Ph. D, but this was disturbed by the break of war in 1939.

During the war, Crick worked as a scientist for the British Admiralty but decided to leave in 1947 to study biology. He married Ruth Doreen Dodd in 1940 and had a son named F. C. Crick but later divorced in 1947. He went to Cambridge and worked at the Strangeways Research Laboratory with the financial help of his family and a studentship from the Medical Research Council. In 1949 he joined the Medical Research Council Unit located in Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge which was later moved to Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 1962. Crick became an accepted research student at Caius College in Cambridge in 1950 and received his Ph. D. in 1954.

In the beginning of 1951, Crick met James Watson and decided to work together to determine the DNA structure. They used the x-ray diffraction images of larger molecules, which were made by Maurice Wilkins, as an aid for their experimental trials. After years of hard work and effort they proposed their idea of the double-helical structure for DNA in 1953. Later Crick and Watson also proposed a general theory for the structure of viruses together. In 1962 Crick, Watson and Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.

Crick continued to study genetic codes and viruses, and more recently spent his time on biochemistry and genetics, investigating protein synthesis. Throughout his life Francis Crick was given the following awards: Warren Triennial Prize Lecturer with Watson, 1959; Lasker Foundation Award with Watson and Wilkins, 1960; Prix Charles Leopold Meyer of the French Academy of Sciences, 1961; Award of Merit of the Gairdner Foundation, 1962; Research Corporation Award, 1962. In 1962 Crick was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of arts and Sciences, a Fellow of University, London and a fellow of Churchill College Cambridge from 1960 to 1961. In 1976 he joined the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California, where he became interested in studies on functions of the brain. Crick remarried in 1949 to Odile Speed and has two daughters, Gabrielle and Jacqueline. His wife and daughters live together in their house called "The Golden Helix."