Edward Neville da Costa Andrade was the first to pick up the young scientist after schooling, but real research would have to wait for WWII to play out. During the war, Crick did war related research—magnetic and acoustic mines—under the British Admiralty. In 1947, he left this group to be part of a large movement of physicists finding comfortable positions in biology.

Crick then had to go to Cambridge to learn a whole new set of skills. Crick moved from place to place, laboratory to laboratory, picking up pieces of info here and there. He participated in Molecular Biology and X-Ray diffraction, to name a few. During his time spent with X-Ray crystallography, Crick was witness to numerous failed attempts by his co-workers to pin down the structure of DNA. Of course, all this was risky research because many people believed that DNA was structurally uninteresting and not worth the effort.