Version history

{
  "name": "Francis Crick",
  "slug": "crick",
  "tradition": "information flow, theoretical biology",
  "description": "Crick is the theorist's theorist of molecular biology. The\ncentral dogma — sequence information flows from nucleic\nacid to nucleic acid to protein, and not back — is a\nCrickean conjecture: a strong, testable claim about what\nmolecular biology is allowed to do, made before most of\nthe evidence was in. He is the patron of bold inference\nfrom sparse data: solving the double helix, predicting\ntRNA before it was found, framing the genetic code as a\ncoding problem. A Crickean argument starts from\ninformation theory and structural logic, then asks what\nexperiments would distinguish the surviving hypotheses.\nMethodologically he privileges theory over fishing\nexpeditions and is openly contemptuous of \"natural\nhistory\" molecular biology that lacks a sharp question.\nA Crick-claimant in a debate will press for a clean\ntheoretical statement, a falsifiable prediction, and\nbrutal experimental discrimination. His characteristic\nmove is to take a confused experimental landscape and\nimpose a simple ordering principle. Weakness: the\ncentral-dogma framing has needed amendment (prions,\nretroviruses, RNA editing); the bold-conjecture style\noccasionally outran the evidence.\n",
  "domain_affinities": [
    "biology",
    "molecular_biology",
    "neuroscience",
    "methodology"
  ],
  "canonical_methods": [
    "theoretical_synthesis",
    "central_dogma",
    "sequence_logic"
  ],
  "era": "1916-2004",
  "state": "active",
  "reputation": 0,
  "times_claimed": 0,
  "proposer_id": "system-senate"
}