Odile Speed, artist: born King's Lynn, Norfolk 11 August 1920; married 1949 Francis Crick (died 2004; two daughters); died La Jolla, California 5 July 2007.
Odile Crick had the Bohemian temperament of the artist she was. Yet probably her most famous work will always be the simple and precise diagram she drew to her husband's instructions, in March or April 1953, of the structure of DNA, the first sketch ever done of the famous double helix - used to illustrate the scientific paper in Nature announcing the discovery by Francis Crick and James Watson. It has never been bettered as a simplified depiction of that shape: two intertwined ribbons linked by 10 rungs per turn.
Odile Speed met Francis Crick in the Admiralty in 1945 when, on her way home one evening, she spilled a bag of Brussels sprouts on the floor of the office where he was temporarily working. He helped her pick them up, asked her out and was refused. A few weeks later, he tried again. Crick was already married, though separated, and was to be an incorrigible flirt throughout his life, but his marriage to Odile lasted 55 years until his death in 2004.
Odile Speed was born in King's Lynn in 1920, the daughter of a jeweller and his French wife. She showed an early interest in art and studied in Vienna in the 1930s. She was about to go to the Sorbonne when the Second World War broke out. She joined the WRNS and drove trucks for some months before her fluent German caused her recruitment to a special unit listening in on German radio traffic. Later she transferred to a job translating captured torpedo manuals. This was how she met Crick, who was working on circuits in German acoustic torpedoes.
Relieved to be out of the tedium of military employment, Odile returned to art school, to St Martin's in London, and married Crick in 1949, wearing a dress of her own design. They moved to Cambridge and lived at first in a tiny, spartan flat in some poverty: twice they had to pawn their typewriter for cash.
She taught at the "Tech" (now Anglia Polytechnic University) before child-rearing took priority. Gabrielle was born in 1951 and Jacqueline in 1954. A fine cook and a convivial host, Odile often fed and entertained first Jim Watson and Maurice Wilkins as they schemed their way to the double helix, then later the crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, who became a good friend and convalesced in Odile's care after her ultimately unsuccessful operations for cancer.
When, on the last day of February 1953 Francis told her excitedly of the double helix discovery, she took no notice: "He was always saying that kind of thing." But when nine years later she heard the news of the Nobel Prize while out shopping, she immediately rushed to the fishmonger for ice to fill the bath and cool the champagne: a party was inevitable.
In the 1960s, the Cricks' parties at their home in Portugal Place, Cambridge or their cottage near Haverhill became much wilder, especially when shared with the polygamous pornographic sculptor John Gayer Anderson or the wealthy LSD dealer Henry Todd. At one party, a nude model posed on a couch to encourage the guests to be amateur artists. Fascinated by the female form, Odile liked to paint curvaceous nudes, the models including her husband's secretaries or au pairs hired to look after the children.
In the 1970s the Cricks moved to California, dividing their time between a suburban hilltop in La Jolla and a house in the desert. Odile never lost her grace and charm as she cared for Francis selflessly during his three-year battle with cancer, though in her eighties herself. Fit till the end, she died after a short illness.
Matt Ridley
And from The Washington Post:
Odile Crick with her husband, Francis H.C. Crick, in Cambridge, England. Mrs. Crick, an artist, illustrated the work of her husband, whose team received a Nobel Prize for its DNA research.
Photo Credit: Courtesy Of The Salk Institute For Biological Studies
-- Washington Post, July 21, 2007
Odile Crick; Sketched Model of
Husband's
Discovery About DNA
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 21, 2007; B06
Odile Crick, 86, an artist who made the first widely published sketch of the double-helix structure of DNA, died July 5 at her home in La Jolla, Calif. She had cancer.
Her husband, Francis H.C. Crick, was one of three men credited with discovering the structure of the molecule. Mrs. Crick made it visible to the world in an April 1953 issue of the journal Nature.
Her graceful drawing of the double-helix structure of DNA with intertwined helical loops has become a symbol of the achievements of science and its aspirations to understand the secrets of life. The image represents the base pairs of nucleic acids, twisted around a center line to show the axis of the helix. Terrence J. Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, where Francis Crick later worked, said: "Mrs. Crick's drawing was an abstract representation of DNA, but it was accurate with regard to its shape and size of its spacing.
"The models you see now have all the atoms in them," Sejnowski said. "The one in Nature was the backbone and gave the bare outline. It may be the most famous [scientific] drawing of the 20th century, in that it defines modern biology."
Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins were credited with the first explanation of DNA and its structure, which has been revolutionary in understanding genetics and spurred the field of biotechnology. They shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their work on deoxyribonucleic acid.
Mrs. Crick was initially reluctant to abandon her pottery and paintings of Rubenesque nudes to take on the job of illustrating her husband's work.
She also was famously underwhelmed when her husband -- returning from his standing lunch with Watson at the Eagle pub in Cambridge, England -- excitedly told her for the first time about his DNA findings.
"You were always coming home and saying things like that," she said, "so naturally I thought nothing of it."
Odile Speed was born Aug. 11, 1920, in King's Lynn in Norfolk, England. Her mother was French, and her father was a British jeweler.
She studied art in London, Paris and Vienna but returned home when the Nazis advanced into Austria. She became an officer in the Women's Royal Naval Service, and her proficiency in German brought her work as a code-breaker and translator of captured documents.
She was stationed at the Admiralty defense complex in London when she first met Crick, a scientist four years her senior working on military research, particularly magnetic and acoustic mines.
She married Crick in 1949. After he became famous, the couple became known for their bohemian London parties at their home, the Golden Helix. Mrs. Crick often enlivened the occasions with her accordion.
"A typical party . . . organised on the slightest pretext, would fill all four floors of the Golden Helix with friends, music, punch bowls . . . and the scent of the odd joint in the air," Matt Ridley wrote in his 2006 biography of Francis Crick.
The Cricks settled in California in the late 1970s when Francis received a distinguished professorship at the Salk Institute and switched from his studies of DNA and the genetic code to trying to understand the brain.
When he served as president of the institute, Francis Crick displayed his wife's paintings of nudes around the workplace. He died in 2004.
Survivors include two daughters, Gabrielle Crick of London and Jacqueline Nichols of England; a stepson, Michael F.C. Crick of Bellevue, Wash., co-author of Crickler puzzles for The Washington Post; a brother; and four grandchildren.
Francis Crick once said that his wife stopped him
from using Jacqueline when she was an infant in an experiment that
involved the protein lysozyme, which is found in tears and saliva.
"Odile would have none of it," he wrote in a memoir. "What! Use her
precious baby for an experiment! I was sternly forbidden to attempt it."
Copyright 2007 by The Washington Post
