
CRICK, Francis.
What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery.
First Edition of Francis Crick's What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery; Signed by Him
New York: Basic Books, Publishers, 1988.
$650.00
Out of Stock
Item Number: RRB-7325
* Custom Clamshell Boxes are hand made by the Harcourt Bindery upon request and take approximately 60 days to complete
First edition. Octavo, original cloth. Signed by Francis Crick on the title page. Fine in a fine dust jacket.
Crick's co-discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA (for which he shared a Nobel Prize with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins) was a maddening pursuit beset with false ideas, sloppy models, inconclusive results and fiascos. This will not come as news to readers of Watson's 1968 bestseller The Double Helix. Part memoir, part scientific primer, Crick's gracefully written reminiscence is more concerned with elucidating the intuitive leaps, feats of intellectual courage and perceptual skills that underlie the act of scientific discovery. Writing about his own career with uncommon modesty, he describes his current research into human consciousness and neuroanatomy; brain science of the 1980s, he concludes, is much like molecular biology of the '30s: the major questions remain largely unanswered.
What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery.
$650.00
Out of Stock