What is Francis Crick's first name?

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Francis Crick’s first name is Francis. His full birth name was Francis Harry Compton Crick, and he became one of the central figures in twentieth-century molecular biology.

Crick was born in 1916 in Northamptonshire, England. He initially studied physics and later moved into biology, eventually joining the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. There he began working with the American biologist James Watson on the structure of DNA.

In 1953, Crick and Watson published their model of DNA’s double-helix structure in Nature. Their work drew on experimental evidence from X-ray diffraction research, including work by Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. Crick later made major contributions to understanding how genetic information is translated into proteins, including the central dogma of molecular biology.

“James” is a likely mix-up because Watson was Crick’s famous collaborator. “Maurice” refers to Wilkins, the third 1962 Nobel laureate.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Aug. 2026

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