What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery

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; inscribed by Him in the year of publication to his secretary and lover

New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1988.

$3,000.00

In Stock Item Number: RRB-148918

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First edition of Crick's autobiography. Octavo, original cloth, illustrated. Association copy, inscribed by Francis Crick in the year of publication to his personal assistant on the front free endpaper, "For Maria with grateful thanks for all her efforts love Francis." The recipient was also thanked in the acknowledgements on page xiii, "Finally, my warmest thanks to my secretary, Betty ("Maria") Lang, who has coped splendidly with the many successive versions and all the tedious chores associated with producing a manuscript." Maria Lang was employed at the Salk Institute from 1977 to her retirement in 1994, where her organizational skills and dedication facilitated Crick’s research activities. Crick, an advocate of open marriage, enjoyed with Lang a sexual relationship between 1981 and 1992. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by William Davis. A remarkable association.

"The man who is widely acknowledged to be the best biologist since Darwin, the co-discoverer of DNA, tells his side of the story in this widely-praised memoir" (Sloan Foundation Science Series). 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.