Francis Crick

Francis Harry Compton Crick (1916–2004) was a British molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist who co-discovered the structure of DNA with James Watson — and then, late in his career, declared that the secret of life had been solved and turned his attention to what he called "the secret of the brain": consciousness. With Christof Koch, he launched the modern search for neural correlates of consciousness, insisting that the time for philosophy was over and the time for experiment had begun.

Crick's move from the molecular to the mental was controversial. Critics accused him of neurobiological reductionism — of assuming that identifying the neurons would explain the experience. His defenders noted that he never claimed to solve the hard problem, only to make it empirically tractable. The truth is more subtle: Crick understood that science advances by finding the right level of description, and he believed that for consciousness, that level was the neural circuit, not the philosophical concept.

Crick's wager was that consciousness would yield to the same strategy that cracked the genetic code: find the molecular machinery, and the rest follows. Whether this wager pays off depends on whether consciousness is more like DNA — a physical structure waiting to be read — or more like mathematics — a pattern that exists only in the reading.