Francis Crick, who helped discover the double helix shape of DNA, has died at the age of 88, his family said on Thursday.

Crick died at a hospital in San Diego after a long battle with colon cancer, the Salk Institute in nearby La Jolla said.

British-born Crick won the Nobel Prize in 1962 for his work on DNA's structure, which he discovered in 1953 along with James Watson at Cambridge University. Watson and a third colleague, Maurice Wilkins, shared the prize.

The names of Crick and Watson, youthful friends and colleagues at the time, have been linked ever since.

"I will always remember Francis for his extraordinarily focused intelligence and for the many ways he showed me kindness and developed my self-confidence," Watson said in New York.

"Being with him for two years in a small room in Cambridge was truly a privilege."

Francis Harry Compton Crick was born on June 8, 1916, in Northampton in Britain but had been living in La Jolla, California where he was a distinguished research professor and former president of the Salk Institute.

"Francis Crick will be remembered as one of the most brilliant and influential scientists of all time," said Richard Murphy, the Salk Institute's president and chief executive officer.

Crick, the son of a shoe-factory owner, studied physics and biology but had his efforts interrupted by World War II. Crick went to work as a scientist for the British Admiralty, helping to design magnetic and acoustic mines.

"I still didn't know much about anything so I could go into whatever I wanted," Crick said in 1997 in a lecture at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

"I used what I call the 'Gossip Test' to decide what I wanted to do," Crick said.

"The gossip test is simply that whatever you find yourself gossiping about is what you're really interested in. I had found that my two main interests which I discussed the most were what today would be called molecular biology - what I referred to as the borderline between living and the nonliving - and the workings of the brain."

His career took a crucial turn in 1951 when he struck up a friendship with James Watson, a talkative young American 12 years Crick's junior who was on a postdoctoral fellowship in genetics.

They agreed that DNA was the compound that carried genetic information, not proteins, as many believed at the time.

In 1953 they proposed the twisted ladder like shape called the double helix for DNA, with its paired nucleotides now known by their initials A, C, T and G.

"We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest," reads the introduction to their first paper, published in the science journal Nature.

Crick also wrote books including "Molecules and Men" in 1966, "Life Itself" in 1981, and "The Astonishing Hypothesis, The Scientific Search for the Soul" in 1994.

Crick is survived by his wife, artist Odile Speed who sketched the first rendering of DNA's now-famous structure; two daughters, Gabrielle Crick and Jacqueline Nichols, son Michael Crick, and four grandchildren. Crick and his first wife Ruth Doreen Dodd divorced in 1947.

(China Daily July 31, 2004)