Odile Crick

Odile Crick (11 August 1920 – 5 July 2007) was a British artist best known for her drawing of the double helix structure of DNA discovered by her husband Francis Crick and his partner James D. Watson in 1953.

Odile Crick was born as Odile Speed in King's Lynn, Norfolk, England, to a French mother, Marie-Therese Josephine Jaeger and an English father, Alfred Valentine Speed, who was a jeweller. She was an art student in Vienna when the Nazis occupied Austria in 1938.

Speed joined the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS) as a lorry driver. However, her skills in German led to work as a code-breaker and translator at the Admiralty where she met Francis Crick in 1945. After the war, she finished her art studies at St. Martin's in London.

Odile Speed married Francis Crick in 1949 and lived in Cambridge. Odile Crick worked as a teacher at what is now Anglia Ruskin University before the births of her daughters Gabrielle and Jacqueline.

Francis Crick and James Watson asked her to draw an illustration of the double helix for their paper on DNA for Nature in 1953. The sketch was reproduced widely in textbooks and scientific articles and has become the symbol for molecular biology. Terrence J. Sejnowski of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies said, "It may be the most famous [scientific] drawing of the 20th century, in that it defines modern biology."

However, she was not aware at first of the importance of the discovery. In his memoir What Mad Pursuit, Crick said that she had told him later "You were always coming home and saying things like that, so naturally I thought nothing of it."

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