WASHINGTON, July 29: 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 in a statement.

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 a statement from his office in Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 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, Britain, but had been living in La Jolla, California, where he was a distinguished research professor and former president of the Salk Institute.

Crick, the son of a shoe-factory owner, studied physics and biology but had his efforts interrupted by World War Two. "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, New Jersey.

"I used what I call the 'Gossip Test' to decide what I wanted to do," he added. "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 non-living - and the workings of the brain." -Reuters