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Painter Odile Crick Dead at 86

By Associated Press

6:57 AM EDT, July 30, 2007

Francis Crick (AP/Denis Poroy)

SAN DIEGO - Painter Odile Crick, whose most famous drawing was a graceful sketch of the double-helix structure of DNA, has died.

Crick died July 5 at her home in La Jolla, said her stepson, Michael Crick. She was 86 and had cancer.

Crick's illustration of the double helix appeared in a seminal paper by her husband, Francis Crick, and James Watson in an April 1953 issue of the journal Nature.

The men, along with Maurice Wilkins, were credited with the first explanation of DNA and its structure. They shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their work on deoxyribonucleic acid.

Crick was born in King's Lynn in Norfolk, England. Her interest in art took her to Vienna in the 1930s and would have led her to the Sorbonne had World War II not broken out.

She joined the British Admiralty, where she listened to German radio broadcasts and translated captured torpedo manuals. She met her husband in the same office, where he was studying circuits in German acoustic torpedoes.

Crick mostly painted nudes. Among her subjects were her husband's secretaries and au pairs hired to look after the couple's children. She was initially reluctant to abandon her paintings to take on the job of illustrating her husband's work.

Her only other scientific illustration was a drawing of a girl running that appeared in one of her husband's last papers, an article in Nature Neuroscience on consciousness.

After Francis Crick became famous, the couple became known for their bohemian London parties at their home, the Golden Helix. Odile Crick often enlivened the occasions with her accordion.

They settled in California in the late 1970s when Francis Crick received a distinguished professorship at the Salk Institute and switched from his studies of DNA and genetic code to trying to understand the brain.

He died in 2004.

She is survived by two daughters, Gabrielle A. Crick and Jacqueline M-T Nichols, both of England; Michael Crick of Seattle; and four grandchildren.