What nationality was Francis Crick?

Francis Crick was British. More precisely, he was an English molecular biologist, biophysicist and neuroscientist, born in Weston Favell, Northamptonshire, England, in 1916.

Crick first trained in physics at University College London and worked on magnetic and acoustic mines during the Second World War. After the war, he turned to biology and joined the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, where he began collaborating with the American biologist James Watson in 1951.

Their 1953 model of DNA’s double-helical structure, developed alongside important work by Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, transformed modern genetics. Crick, Watson and Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Crick later moved to the Salk Institute in California and investigated neuroscience and consciousness.

“English” is a more geographically specific description, but “British” is the canonical nationality answer. He lived and worked in the United States later in life, yet that does not make him American; nor was he Irish or Canadian.