Francis Crick

Francis Crick was a mind that could not stop turning information over, and it is fitting that he spent his life reading the code of life itself. With his Sun in Gemini, his vitality shone through the sign of "between," the messenger, the eternal twin who is always two persons in one. This is the solar marriage of Helios and Mercury as brothers, so the ego glows through communication, curiosity and versatility, and Crick embodied it: a molecular biologist, biophysicist and, later, a neuroscientist, forever moving information from one place to another. In 1953, with James Watson and drawing on the work of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, he helped decipher the double-helix structure of DNA, the great message written in every cell. It earned the three men the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and it was Crick who coined the "central dogma" to describe how genetic information flows one way and cannot flow back. His Moon in Virgo gave the meticulous, service-minded engine beneath the wit: an emotional self that found peace of mind in being useful and precise. He turned late in life to the riddle of human consciousness, editing a manuscript on his deathbed, a scientist to the very end.