“We’ve discovered the secret of life.” No small words, but then again, the man who said them had accomplished no small feat. Francis Crick and his counterpart James Watson are two men that humanity owes a great deal. Their work and their obsessions let man peer deeper into himself then ever before. With their work, we could see right down into the very things that make us who we are. We could see our DNA—our genetic makeup—and for the first time, we knew what it meant.

Let us follow the story of Francis Crick, from birth to discovery, and then from discovery till death. What was it like for a man whose entire life could have been summed up in one symbol, one structure: the Double Helix?