Yes, this The Francis Crick Institute, a building named after Francis Crick of Crick and Watson, the discoverers of the DNA double helix.
If you are in St Pancras station on the ground floor, facing the ticket barriers, and you turn to your left and exit the station then you will see the Francis Crick Institute across the road.
Most of the interior of the building is given over to labs, but there is an exhibition on the ground floor which is free and which explores early DNA and what light that sheds on understanding what we were and how we got here.
Most early DNA is recovered from teeth or from the little bone in the middle ear because those bones are hard and resist disintegration, and the segments of DNA within them are the most suitable for investigation.
The ancient DNA is only broken strands, and so it is part of the work of the Institute to recombine the strands to build a picture of our ancestors.
Why The Building Is So Named
You may wonder why the Institute is named after Crick and not Watson?
It is partly because it is a British institution located in London, and Crick was a British scientist, whereas Watson was American.
And partly it is because of embarrassment over remarks that Watson made in a 2007 interview with The Sunday Times. He is reported to have said that from his own observations with employees, black people are not as intelligent as some other groups.
Of course, intelligence measured by IQ tests is, supposedly, blind to colour or ethnic grouping.
And yes, the evidence is clear that some groups do better on standard intelligence tests.
But here is the interesting piece of data.
The Flynn effect shows that average scores across all demographic groups have risen substantially since the tests were first given and that this shift has happened too quickly to be genetic.
The argument from that is that changing environments, schooling, and technology influence test performance. And if that is true, then genetics does not rule.
From my own observations I say that whatever IQ tests across different groups show or do not show is beside the point in important ways. Intelligence does not equate to value, or to the depth of a person’s humanity.
I guess Watson was too much the scientist and not enough of an observer.
And then – how big was his sample group?
And that is not to forget that Rosalind Franklin was the British biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer whose work led to the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, and that her work was used without her permission and without her knowledge, and she was not credited when Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins won the 1962 Nobel Prize.
Franklin died in 1958, and by the time the wrong was recognised years later it was too late to ‘put the record straight’ publicly because Nobel Prize rules can only be awarded to living persons.
Personally, I would give her the prize today, and add her name retrospectively to that of the other three recipients.
And if you have not heard of Maurice Wilkins, he worked with Franklin to capture the image of DNA that was the key that sent Crick and Watson on the trail.
But he fell out with Franklin, and somehow she was excluded from contact with Crick and Watson. Crick knew what Franklin’s contribution was, though, so he doesn’t come out of this very well either.
