Matthew Cobb

I mean, he was very private, okay?

So I felt

I mean, all biographers feel this.

This is the first biography I've written.

I'm not sure I'm going to write another one.

Certainly not about one where there are people who are still alive.

Because, you know, you spend a lot... You'd be a terrible nosy parker.

You'd go around rummaging around in people's private lives.

The family... It's not an authorised biography, but the family have been amazingly tolerant for me, digging around, including in the less salubrious aspects of their father's life or their grandfather's life, which...

understandably, they're not particularly proud of and wouldn't want people to focus on.

I don't think they should.

But they've been amazingly supportive and tolerant of that.

So he was very, very private.

And that's one of the things he didn't like about the double helix because it, I mean, if you read the double helix with the eyes, if you read carefully, it's all there.

Crick's penchant for parties, for womanizing, you know, his lechery is all there.

Jim hints at it and, you know, you read it and then you go, oh, this is what it's saying.

So Francis wasn't happy about that, understandably so.

And...

I think he would be proud, but I think... I mean, he said in something like... In the Millennium, the Wedgwood Plate Company, they make porcelain plates.

They wanted to have a picture of all the great discoverers of science of the Millennium.