Matthew Cobb

speaker

579 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 7 Dec

Matthew Cobb’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

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Ground Truths · The Story of Francis Crick, a new masterpiece biography by Matthew Cobb · 7 Dec 2025 podcast

It just doesn't look like that.

The double helix is...

is almost, I think, actually unique in that you can immediately see what its function, the link between function and structure.

And you can explain it to a 12-year-old, as Crick did to his son in this very famous letter that Michael eventually auctioned and gave a lot of the money to the Salk Institute for.

Yeah, and so anything else about his family that you want to mention?

Well, his granddaughter, Kindra, is a neuroscientist and an artist.

She's a very famous artist, so she's kind of fused the two sides of the family.

Michael, who is from his first, Crick's first marriage, went on to work for Microsoft, so apparently spellcheck, if you get cross with that in Word, that's Michael's fault.

And Gabrielle, his surviving daughter,

is a very accomplished artist who lives in London.

So that fusion of art and science, which was part of the Crick's marriage, I mean, Odile did draw the double helix, but she drew figures for many of his papers, including this very strange one of mermaids intertwined

that Crick used to explain something rather complicated about X-ray crystallography in the 1950s.

And, you know, their house was full of art, always had art around it.

There was mainly Odile who chose it, but Francis was very interested in that, and poetry, and also these parties that were very wild in Cambridge, and I think were probably a bit calmer in San Diego.

I'm not sure people would have approved that.

He adored it.

I mean, I didn't make perhaps enough.

I did think about this partly because this is something that historians are interested in.

Place.

So it's a story, his life is also a story of two subjects.

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