Great Man…
| Odile Crick with her husband, Francis H.C. Crick, in Cambridge, England. Mrs. Crick, an artist, illustrated the work of her husband, whose team received a Nobel Prize for its DNA research. |
| Photo Credit: Courtesy Of The Salk Institute For Biological Studies |
“Her graceful drawing of the double-helix structure of DNA with intertwined helical loops has become a symbol of the achievements of science and its aspirations to understand the secrets of life. The image represents the base pairs of nucleic acids, twisted around a center line to show the axis of the helix. Terrence J. Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, where Francis Crick later worked, said: ‘Mrs. Crick’s drawing was an abstract representation of DNA, but it was accurate with regard to its shape and size of its spacing.
‘The models you see now have all the atoms in them,’ Sejnowski said. ‘The one in Nature was the backbone and gave the bare outline. It may be the most famous [scientific] drawing of the 20th century, in that it defines modern biology.'”
The Washington Post, July 21, 2007