Short answers, pulled from the story.
Francis Crick was an English molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist who lived from the 8th of June 1916 to the 28th of July 2004. With James Watson, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins, he played a crucial role in deciphering the helical structure of the DNA molecule. Crick and Watson published their model in Nature in 1953.
Francis Crick was jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, sharing it with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins. The prize recognised their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material.
Francis Crick used the term "central dogma" to summarise the idea that genetic information flows one way, from DNA to RNA to protein, and cannot flow back from proteins to nucleic acids. He later said he did not mean a rule beyond question, only a compelling idea without much solid evidence to support it at the time.
Some of Rosalind Franklin's unpublished X-ray diffraction data were used by Watson and Crick without her knowledge or consent in building the double helix model. They drew on her 1951 seminar, discussions with Maurice Wilkins, and a Medical Research Council progress report given to Crick by Max Perutz in February 1953. Her colleague Aaron Klug believed she was "two steps away" from the structure herself.
Francis Crick turned his full attention to consciousness in the 1980s after taking a 1976 sabbatical at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. He taught himself neuroanatomy and collaborated with Christof Koch from 1990 to 2005, focusing on how the brain generates visual awareness within a few hundred milliseconds of viewing a scene.
Francis Crick died of colon cancer on the morning of the 28th of July 2004 at a hospital in La Jolla, California. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered into the Pacific Ocean. According to Christof Koch, he was editing a manuscript on his death bed, a scientist until the bitter end.