Cobb aims for the tricky 'middle path': a life vivid enough to engage readers who haven’t thought about the double helix since high school, and detailed enough to satisfy the scientists ... Crick’s life lends itself to storytelling ... Cobb carefully addresses the controversy surrounding Watson and Crick’s use of the British molecular chemist Rosalind Franklin’s work, but fails to look more broadly at the way women scientists have been excluded from the kind of intimate, generative male collaboration that fueled Crick’s brilliance ... As a full-throated admirer of Crick’s 'galaxy brain,' he tends to gloss over the hard bits having to do with his subject’s less admirable moments ... Cobb acknowledges that a 'Crick halo' sometimes raised the Nobelist’s ideas above criticism — but he leaves it in place. A candid consideration of the contrast between Crick’s shining mind and his occasionally tarnished views would further complicate and enrich this intriguing portrait of a gifted, self-absorbed, exuberant and intuitive man.
Cobb’s book is no hagiography. Briskly paced, it concentrates on Crick’s scientific life, but also offers glimpses, some unflattering, of the man behind the lab bench. The picture it builds is of a brilliant, garrulous and often exasperating individual ... Cobb is careful not to sensationalise, but he leaves the reader in no doubt that Crick’s exuberance could turn boorish ... Cobb writes with clarity and a touch of affection for his subject. His Crick is radical in science and conservative in temperament; deeply irreligious yet moved by poetry; a philanderer who adored his wife. Above all he is insatiably curious — a mind in motion, indeed. And yes, he may also represent something that may now be lost: the era when a single intellect could sit at the centre of a scientific revolution.
In his new biography of the Nobel prize-winning scientist, Matthew Cobb, emeritus professor of zoology at the University of Manchester, does an admirable job of capturing the rare thinker who not only set himself such ambitious goals but made remarkable progress in achieving them, radically remaking two scientific disciplines in the process ... Cobb sets himself an ambitious task in trying to do justice to both Crick’s prolific scientific career and his colourful personal life, and this biography is an impressive work of research and scholarship.
