Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [110]
The truth is hard to uncover now. Rees’s evidence that Crick used LSD to discover the secret of life comes third hand, from unreliable sources, and entirely uncorroborated. Neither Crick nor Watson ever made any reference to it. In his biography of Crick, Matt Ridley gives the idea that Crick used LSD to open his mind to the structure of DNA a summary dismissal. According to Ridley, both Crick’s widow and the man who supplied the couple with LSD assured him that their first encounter with the hallucinogen came in 1967. What’s more, Ridley says, the drug was ‘barely available’ in the UK in 1953. The notion that the ‘then impoverished and conventional Crick would have had access to LSD when it was newly invented in the early 1950s’ is implausible, Ridley argues: ‘there is simply no evidence for it at all’.
Something about this doesn’t quite ring true, though. LSD wasn’t ‘newly invented’ in the 1950s; it was first synthesised in 1938. By 1947 the pharmaceutical firm Sandoz was marketing LSD under the trade name Delysid as a useful drug for psychotherapy. According to David Nichols of Purdue University, who has researched the history of LSD for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Sandoz made it ‘readily available to scientific and clinical investigators for medical research’ until the early 1960s.
The idea that Crick, a signatory to a public call for the legalisation of cannabis, was ‘conventional’ is somewhat laughable – he was anything but. When the Queen came to Cambridge to open the new Medical Research Centre building in 1962, Crick stayed away in protest: he was staunchly against the monarchy, and some years later he refused a knighthood. Crick’s house parties were legendary for their wild drunkenness. And he was an inveterate womaniser. One secretary tells of being chased round the laboratory benches by a randy Crick; when he caught her she had to stab the stiletto heel of her shoe into his foot in order to escape. Then there’s the fact that the ‘conventional’ Crick regularly smoked pot and used LSD later in life. Ridley reports that Crick found LSD’s effects ‘fascinating’.
All of this is enough to make me slightly suspicious of Cristof Koch’s testimony. Koch, a University of California neuroscientist who describes Crick as his ‘mentor’, says that although their conversations were very wide-ranging, Crick never mentioned taking LSD. ‘He told me about a lot of private things, including his parties. But not once about any serious drug use,’ Koch says.
I did say they were secret anarchists. Which is why I am hoping that Fuller might be able to shed some light on the situation. He worked with Crick and Watson for years, attended some of those parties, and went out to buy the champagne on the day of the Nobel Prize announcement. He saw them in almost every situation they faced – does he know about any LSD use? He shakes his head. ‘But,’ he says, ‘Knowing Francis … I imagine he would have experimented if he’d had the chance.’
I imagine so too. We have seen that scientists will do anything in their pursuit of discovery, and Crick and Watson were certainly getting desperate. The American Linus Pauling was closing in on the structure of DNA. Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins were bickering, and being slow to come forward with the data Crick and Watson wanted – so slow, in fact, that Crick and Watson stole what they needed from Wilkins’ lab. When Wilkins complained, Crick told him to ‘cheer up and take it from us that even if we kicked you in the pants it was between friends. We hope our burglary will at least produce a united front in your group.’
The evidence of anarchy piles up. Crick and Watson weren’t even meant to be working on DNA: their boss at Cambridge had told them to stop. They gave a shrug, went underground and carried on in secret. And Crick’s attitude to scientific propriety is clear from his pronouncements years later. In 1979, amid many accusations that Franklin wasn’t accorded enough