Matthew Cobb

It's also two places.

It's Cambridge, where he was able to do his molecular work, but it's also the salt.

The salt was incredibly important to him in giving him a connection with American science, which of course is the powerhouse of

of all the work he was interested in, most of it, the really important work was being done in the USA.

And the salt by those regular visits gave him that contact and then eventually becoming a full-time fellow.

And he said he never felt, he never took American citizenship.

He didn't feel American.

But he did feel California, Californian.

And he loved Southern California.

And they built this house in the desert in Borrego Springs in 1992 or something.

Francis designed it.

He'd always had a penchant for designing houses and stuff like that.

amateur architect um and it's very carefully designed so that on the basis apparently of a japanese inn so each window you don't look onto another room you look onto this central area which was uh there was a patch of bare desert so it's lots and lots of lovely flowers because he adored gardening but there's also a patch of bare desert as a memory or you know a memory of what was

also a hint of what was going to come eventually uh yeah it'll all go back to desert uh and they built this house and the the colors and so on of the the sunsets is what he adored uh and i i i realized that that would be very uh mcclure michael mcclure went to visit them a number of times that kind of just the sensation the visual sensation and the heat and the smells

uh of the the desert flowers that would all fit in with mcclure's very very sensual poetic understanding that that was part of crick which you don't get from reading his scientific papers you don't get this much more intimate and essential side of of somebody which you can relate to because you know we all you may not particularly like mcclure's poetry or we might but we can all understand

that joy, the fun he found in the world and in understanding it.

Yeah.

I mean, I should preface it by saying, if anybody asks my advice, which they don't, I wouldn't advise naming a building or an institute after an individual.

It's just kind of fraught with dangers.

You don't know what the future's going to hold because, you know, opinions change.