Which college at Cambridge was Francis Crick affiliated with as a graduate student?

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Which college at Cambridge was Francis Crick affiliated with as a graduate student? He was affiliated with Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

Crick had first studied physics at University College London and began doctoral work there, but the Second World War interrupted his research. After wartime work at the Admiralty Research Laboratory, he moved into the Cambridge scientific community and became a PhD student at Gonville and Caius College.

His research was based mainly at the Cavendish Laboratory, where he worked on X-ray studies of proteins and later joined James Watson in investigating DNA. Crick completed his PhD in 1954 with a thesis on X-ray diffraction in polypeptides and proteins. He later became an Honorary Fellow of Gonville and Caius, reinforcing the college’s association with him.

The college can be confused with King’s College London, where Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins worked on DNA diffraction data. Trinity and St John’s are also Cambridge colleges, but they were not the answer to this question. Crick, Watson and Wilkins received the 1962 Nobel Prize for work on nucleic-acid structure.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Sept. 2026

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