The Francis Crick institute is being built with the expected cost of over £650 million by six leading UK research institutions, and is scheduled to be finished by 2015. When operational, the institute will employ almost 1500 staff, including 1250 scientests, and have an operarating budget of over £100 million. The head of the institute is Sir Paul Nurse, a geneticist and cell biologist who was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.
An animation of what the Institute is supposed to look like is available here
Francis Crick, the man whose name the newly built institute bears, was a molecular biologist and biophysicist best known for his contribution to "The discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material," for which he was, together with his colleagues - James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine.
The best known part of their discovery was determinig the structure of the deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA, based on crystalography data obtained by Rosalind Franklin, and constructing its model. Together they have shown that DNA is a double helix, maintained by specific pairing of bases adenine (A) with thymin (T) and cytosine (C) with guanine (G). Their seminal paper presenting this discovery ends saying that "It has not escaped our attention that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material," and indeed this has become part of what is today known as the central dogma of molecular biology. What this dogma actually says is that DNA serves as a template for its own sythesis, replication, and also for synthesis of RNA, transcription, which is in turn used as a blueprint for synthesis of proteins, the so called translation. Each amino-acid, a basic building block of protein structure, is encoded by a triplet of DNA bases. All this is in fact much more complicated, and generations of scientests have taken part in uncovering the secrets of each of these processes, but for the sake of the cache, this basic understanding is absolutely sufficient.
And now to the cache itself. In order to find it, you will need to solve the following. To make the letters easier to read, I'd suggest you open the full-sized picture (right-click the picture, select "view image" and then just left click to zoom to full size):
You can check your solution here:
Once at GZ, you are looking for a camouflaged eppendorf tube, a little bit larger than a standard nano. It is accessible 24/7 all year round, but I guess you will find it easier to find during daylight hours.
Good luck and happy hunting!
Congratulations to Plasadda for being the First To Solve and the First To Find!
