Editing Francis Crick (section)

==Neuroscience and other interests==
[[File:Decisionbrain.jpg|thumb|right|Results from an [[fMRI]] experiment in which people made a conscious decision about a visual stimulus. The small region of the brain coloured orange shows patterns of activity that correlate with the decision making process. Crick stressed the importance of finding new methods to probe human brain function.]]
Crick's period at Cambridge was the pinnacle of his long scientific career, but he left Cambridge in 1977 after 30&nbsp;years, having been offered (and having refused) the Mastership of [[Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge|Gonville and Caius]]. James Watson claimed at a Cambridge conference marking the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA in 2003:

<blockquote>Now perhaps it's a pretty well kept secret that one of the most uninspiring acts of the University of Cambridge over this past century was to turn down Francis Crick when he applied to be the [[Arthur Balfour Professor of Genetics|Professor of Genetics]], in 1958. Now there may have been a series of arguments, which led them to reject Francis. It was really saying, don't push us to the frontier.{{Citation needed|date=November 2007}}</blockquote>

The apparently "pretty well kept secret" had already been recorded in [[Soraya de Chadarevian|Soraya De Chadarevian]]'s ''Designs For Life: Molecular Biology After World War II'', published by [[Cambridge University Press]] in 2002. His major contribution to molecular biology in Cambridge is well documented in ''The History of the University of Cambridge: Volume 4 (1870 to 1990)'', which was published by CUP in 1992.

According to the [[University of Cambridge]]'s genetics department official website, the electors of the professorship could not reach consensus, prompting the intervention of then University Vice-Chancellor [[Edgar Adrian, 1st Baron Adrian|Lord Adrian]]. Lord Adrian first offered the professorship to a compromise candidate, [[Guido Pontecorvo]], who refused, and is said to have offered it then to Crick, who also refused.

In 1976, Crick took a [[sabbatical]] year at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in [[La Jolla, California]]. Crick had been a nonresident fellow of the Institute since 1960. Crick wrote, "I felt at home in Southern California."<ref name="CrickWMP145">[[#Crick|Crick (1990)]], p. 145</ref> After the sabbatical, Crick left Cambridge to continue working at the Salk Institute. He was also an adjunct professor at the [[University of California, San Diego]].<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.chicagotribune.com/sns-crick-obit-story.html#|title=Co-discoverer of DNA's double helix dies|last=Mestel|first=Rosie|work=Chicago Tribune|access-date=20 September 2018}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |title=Nobel Laureates |url=http://nobel.universityofcalifornia.edu/list.html |publisher=University of California |access-date=20 September 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130316124306/http://nobel.universityofcalifornia.edu/list.html |archive-date=16 March 2013 |url-status=dead }}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/uchistory/general_history/overview/1960timeline.html|title=University of California History Digital Archives|website=lib.berkeley.edu|access-date=20 September 2018}}</ref> He taught himself [[neuroanatomy]] and studied many other areas of [[neuroscience]] research. It took him several years to disengage from molecular biology because exciting discoveries continued to be made, including the discovery of [[alternative splicing]] and the discovery of [[restriction enzyme]]s, which helped make possible [[genetic engineering]]. Eventually, in the 1980s, Crick was able to devote his full attention to his other interest, [[consciousness]]. His autobiographical book, ''[[What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery]]'', includes a description of why he left molecular biology and switched to neuroscience.

Upon taking up work in theoretical neuroscience, Crick was struck by several things:
* there were many isolated subdisciplines within neuroscience with little contact between them
* many people who were interested in behaviour treated the brain as a [[black box (systems)|black box]]
* consciousness was viewed as a [[taboo]] subject by many [[neurobiologist]]s

Crick hoped he might aid progress in neuroscience by promoting constructive interactions between specialists from the many different subdisciplines concerned with consciousness. He also collaborated with [[neurophilosophy|neurophilosophers]] such as [[Patricia Churchland]]. In 1983, as a result of their studies of computer models of neural networks, Crick and Mitchison proposed that the function of [[REM sleep]] and dreaming is to remove certain modes of interactions in networks of cells in the mammalian cerebral cortex; they called this hypothetical process "[[reverse learning]]" or "unlearning". In the final phase of his career, Crick established a collaboration with [[Christof Koch]] that led to publication of a series of articles on consciousness during the period spanning from 1990<ref>"[https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/SC/B/C/F/D/_/scbcfd.pdf Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness]" by Francis Crick and Christof Koch in ''Seminars in the Neurosciences'' (1990): Volume 2 pages 263–275.</ref> to 2005. Crick made the strategic decision to focus his theoretical investigation of consciousness on how the brain generates visual [[awareness]] within a few hundred milliseconds of viewing a scene. Crick and Koch proposed that consciousness seems so mysterious because it involves very short-term [[memory]] processes that are as yet poorly understood. In his book ''[[The Astonishing Hypothesis]]'', Crick described how [[neurobiology]] had reached a mature enough stage so that consciousness could be the subject of a unified effort to study it at the molecular, cellular and behavioural levels. Crick was sceptical about the value of [[Connectionism|computational models]] of mental function that are not based on details about brain structure and function.

Crick was aware that research on consciousness was a difficult task, as he wrote to [[Martynas Yčas]] in April 1996:<blockquote>I don't think we shall fully understand consciousness by the end of this century, but it's possible we can get a glimpse of the answer by then. Whether it will all fall into place, as molecular biology did, without a vital force, or whether we need a radical formulation, only time will tell. Best wishes, Yours, Francis. P.S. By the way, I've not been knighted.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Strauss |first=Bernard S |date=2019-03-01 |title=Martynas Yčas: The "Archivist" of the RNA Tie Club |url=https://doi.org/10.1534/genetics.118.301754 |journal=Genetics |volume=211 |issue=3 |pages=789–795 |doi=10.1534/genetics.118.301754 |pmid=30846543 |pmc=6404253 |issn=1943-2631}}</ref></blockquote>