What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery

Dust jacket notes: "Francis Crick's place in history was assured when he and James Watson unraveled the celebrated double helix of DNA. Their discover of the structure of the genetic material of virtually all life on earth is regarded as the greatest biological advance of the twentieth century. Now, in What Mad Pursuit, Crick gives his own long-awaited account of the unique combination of choice and chance behind this epoch-making discovery, and how it, in turn, led to the cracking of the genetic code and the launching of the molecular biological revolution. 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' insisted Keats in 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' the poem from which What Mad Pursuit takes its title. Here, in an ebullient style that crackles with wit and life, Crick explores the more complex relationships between truth and beauty he has found in everything rom the roles of experiment and theory in science to the popular book, television, and movie versions of the double helix story. 'Elegance and a deep simplicity, ' he writes, 'are useful guides in physics. In biology such intellectual tools can be very misleading.' Working today, as always, at the frontier of human knowledge, this genius of modern science describes how he is applying the lessons of his pioneering discoveries in molecular biology to his latest pursuit of 'scientific gold' - understanding the mysteries of the brain."