Odile Crick (August 11, 1920 – July 5, 2007) was a British artist best known for her drawing of the double helix structure of DNA discovered by her husband Francis Crick and James D. Watson in 1953.[1]
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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. [2] She was an art student in Vienna when the Nazis occupied Austria in 1938.
Speed joined the Womens 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.[3] After the war, she finished her art studies at St. Martin's in London.
The Cricks married in 1949 and lived in Cambridge. Odile Crick worked as a teacher at what is now Anglia Ruskin University before the births of their daughters Gabrielle on 15 July 1951 and Jacqueline on 12 March 1954.[4]
Crick and Watson asked her to draw an illustration of the double helix for their paper on DNA for Nature in 1953.[5] The sketch was reproduced widely in textbooks and scientific articles and has become the symbol for molecular biology.[6]
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."[7]
Several exhibitions have been held of Crick's paintings of curvaceous nudes. Her models included her husband's secretaries and au pairs for their children.[8]
The Cricks became famous for their parties in the 1960s either in Cambridge or at a cottage near Haverhill. At one party, a nude model posed on a couch to encourage their guests to become amateur painters.[9]
When her husband became a professor at the Salk Institute in the 1970s,[10] the Cricks moved to California.
She died from cancer in La Jolla, California, aged 86, three years after her husband.[11] The Odile Crick Memorial Exhibition of her art was held at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, on October 12, 2007
She was survived by a brother Philippe, two daughters Gabrielle and Jacqueline (1954–2011), and two grandchildren, the stepchildren of Jacqueline and her husband Christopher Nichols; her stepson, Michael (by Francis Crick's first marriage to Ruth Doreen Dodd) has four children: Alexander, Camberley, Francis, and Kindra by his wife Barbara.