It’s difficult to overstate the impact Francis Crick and his colleague, James Watson, had on the modern world. Together they discovered the structure of DNA, the foundation of life, and for their efforts won a Nobel Prize. Crick died last week in California at the age of 88.

It was the British Crick, trained as a physicist, and the American Watson who in 1953, and building on the research of Maurice H.F. Wilkins and Dr. Rosalind Franklin, finally came up with the double helix structure that is DNA. In 1962 Crick, Watson and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in medicine for their work; Franklin was denied the honor because she died in 1958.

Crick and his discovery had an enormous impact not only on science but on everyday life. Crick, who was driven in part by a desire to see religious explanations for life replaced with rational, scientific ones, went on to become what The New York Times called the ”guiding intelligence” behind solving many of the riddles the DNA discovery imposed. It was he, for example, who determined that the number of amino acids, the foundation of proteins, was limited.

Today we take much of what Crick and Watson did for granted, for science has moved so far beyond their most basic discovery. Now we talk casually about stem cell research. We routinely read of DNA evidence in criminal trials and we worry about genetically modified food. All of that and more is based on the work of Crick and Watson.

Crick never gave up his scientific search for answers. He spent his later years at the Salk Institute in San Diego, working to discover the nature of consciousness. He was not, by most accounts, a particularly modest man, and he didn’t need to be. He was, in fact, a dreamer, what the Times called ”one of biology’s few theoreticians.” His theories changed the world.