The British-born scientist who helped discover the genetic blueprint of life has died, it emerged today.
Francis Crick, who was 88, was described tonight as an "undisputed genius" and hailed as one of the architects of a new "golden age" of microbiology.
He died yesterday at Thornton Hospital, San Diego, California, where he had been battling colon cancer.
Professor Crick shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1962 for discovering the double helix shape of the DNA molecule, one of the crowning scientific achievements of the 20th century.
The prize also went to American Dr James Watson, with whom Prof Crick worked at Cambridge University, and colleague Maurice Wilkins.
Since 1977 Prof Crick had been living in America and working at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, pursuing a new goal - to understand the nature of human consciousness.
Identifying the structure of DNA triggered a revolution in biology that is still continuing today.
It led directly to the dramatic publication in June 2000 of the entire human genome, containing three billion letters of genetic code.
Prof Crick worked out how DNA was translated into proteins, and how the genetic code was written in sequences of three letters, or codons.