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No 15Webcopy.Indd THE MENDEL NEWSLETTER Archival Resources for the History of Genetics & Allied Sciences ISSUED BY THE LIBRARY OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY New Series, No. 15 March 2006 A Word from the Assistant Managing Editor ... hough a bit late in coming, this year’s issue of the Mendel T Newsletter makes up for its delay in its unprecedented length and encompassing content. While the MN has always been a valuable source for the latest acquisitions of collections that cover the history of genetics and it’s related fields, this issue goes a step beyond in providing insight into the trials and tribulations inherent to twentieth century collections, as well as delving into how technology has further affected the ways in which research is conducted. Chris Beckett’s article on the Francis Crick Papers analyzes how lending documents to colleagues and scholars prior to a collection’s arrival at an archival repository has resulted in the absences of key documents from collections or their representation as photocopies. James Tabery’s review of the Lancelot Hogben Papers at the University of Birmingham and Charles Greifenstein’s notes on the acquisition of the George Harrison Shull papers illustrate how gaps in the historical record can result from an individual’s temperament towards ones own material and the division of material among family members, respectively. This does reveal IN THIS ISSUE that much can happen to historically significant documents before they come to an archive. Ocassionally there are those The Scientific Papers of Francis Crick: A Footnote who go above and beyond in collecting their material for on Custodial History . pg. 3 posterity, with ticket stubs and grocery receipts intermixed Looking Back on Lancelot’s Laughter: The with important correspondence. Others handle their material Lancelot Thomas Hogben Papers, University of with a “slash and burn” mentality – disposing of material they Birmingham, Special Collections . pg. 10 believe is no longer useful. And then there are those whose papers are almost intact – leaving the archivist and historian Book Collection on Human Genetics Donated to the to wonder if documents were inadvertently thrown out, University of Washington, Seattle . pg. 18 loaned to a colleague, or selectively destroyed. Regardless, now that we are in the digital age, with the use of e-mail and Genetics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison: A Guide to Some Historical Resources . pg. 19 word processing, and the concerns of disk space, one can only imagine how many documents and electronic correspondence H-Eugenics Goes Online . pg. 23 that document research in genetics have fallen prey to the “delete” key. George Harrison Shull Acquisition at APS . pg. 24 (continued on page 2) The History of Genetics Online . pg. 27 The Mendel Newsletter The use of technology as a research tool also comes up in this issue in relation to digital cameras, oral history, listservs, and online histories. These new tools affect not only how ideas and information are disseminated (as with online and listserv resources), IS YOUR ADDRESS but also how scholars conduct their research and CORRECT? repositories accommodate the new technology. Finally, a note regarding future plans for the To insure that the Mendel Mendel Newsletter. Next year we will change our Newsletter gets to you in a publication date February and March to mid to late timely fashion, we want to August. We hope that this move will provide more check that the address on time for our contributors to write their articles, as well the label is up to date. If any as enable us to put information into the hands of our changes need to be made, readers at the beginning of the Fall semester when please use the Subscription many begin to plan their classes and their research Update Card on Page 31, trips. or e-mail J.J. Ahern at [email protected] Joseph-James Ahern American Philosophical Society Library March 2006 Mendel Newsletter American Philosophical Society Library 105 South Fifth Street Philadelphia, PA 19106-3386 Editor: Michael Dietrich Managing Editor: Martin L. Levitt Department of Biological Sciences [email protected] 215 Gilman Hall, HB 6044 Assistant Managing Editor: Dartmouth College Joseph – James Ahern Hanover, NH 03755 [email protected] [email protected] Editorial Board: Mark B. Adams, University of Pennsylvania Barbara Kimmelman, Philadelphia University Garland E. Allen, Washington University Martin L. Levitt, American Philosophical Society John Beatty, University of Minnesota Victor A. McKusick, Johns Hopkins University Frederick B. Churchill, Indiana University Jane Maienschein, Arizona State University Michael R. Dietrich, Dartmouth College Diane B. Paul, University of Massachusetts, Boston Bernardino Fantini, Institut Louis Jantet David J. Rhees, Bakken Museum and Library d’Histoire de Medicine, Geneva Jan Sapp, York University, Toronto Canada Vassiliki Beatty Smocovitis, University of Florida 2 New Series, No. 15 March 2006 The Scientific Papers of Francis Crick A Footnote on Custodial History Chris Beckett Formerly Project Archivist, Francis Crick Papers The Wellcome Library Contact: [email protected] “The world seems made up of three kinds of people. Collectors, who collect and don’t always much care what. Scholars, who hoard every scrap of paper. And people like myself, who wonder why.” (Crick, 2001)1 ountains like fortress walls hug the snug capital final leg of his holiday.3 M city of the Tyrol. The train from Innsbruck to It was a bullish letter that Wilkins wrote on Zurich runs picturesquely up the snowy Inn Valley, the train to Crick, marked by a co-operative eagerness through the Arlberg Tunnel and along the side of the to share his results with Crick and Watson, and full of Zurichsee. The journey to Zurich would probably have optimism about the DNA research that laid immediately taken Maurice Wilkins some six hours. In the spring of ahead, particularly his hopes for obtaining diffraction 1952, Wilkins had been enjoying his time away from patterns from whole cells or in situ DNA. The letter the laboratory, exploring the beer cellars of Munich, made a chipper reference to a Rosalind Franklin skiing in the Dolomites and walking beneath orange who “barks often but doesn’t succeed in biting”, and trees at Gardone Riviera. the hope was expressed He was completing the The archive of Francis Crick’s (in a counter-balancing last leg of a meandering verbal gesture designed trip that had been part scientific papers is perhaps one of to cement camaraderie holiday, part escape from the last great scientific archives of through identifying his impasse with Rosalind paper records. common experience) that Franklin at King’s College, “Bragg neither barks nor and part scientific mission, bites”. Both did, of course. a mission that he hoped Shortly before leaving for would circumvent – if not resolve – his conflict with his holiday, Wilkins had obtained a good diffraction Franklin. He used his time on the train to write a long pattern from Sepia sperm. In his letter, he reported: prospective letter to Francis Crick. At the head of the first “I have got much better X-ray pictures of the sperm of four sheets, he wrote (like a cinematic establishing- Squid which show very nicely a whole series of helical shot): “on train Innsbruck-Zurich.”2 Wilkins was layer lines and one inter micelle spacing. These spots travelling to see Rudolf Signer “the n[ucleic] a[cid] will not overlap when a disoriented specimen is used man in Bern.…” Signer, it will be remembered, had and I want to do it on living sperm in glass tubes.” previously made available to Wilkins (and others, in To the side of this passage, Wilkins drew for Crick a May, 1950) a supply of DNA material with a very high sketch of his diffraction results, showing the typical molecular weight that was particularly amenable to helical cross. being carefully pulled into the long fibres required for Some fifty years later, in the spring of 2003, successful X-ray diffraction. At Wilkins’s suggestion whilst I was in the midst of cataloguing the first – a suggestion he soon came to regret – Franklin had consignment of Francis Crick’s scientific papers to worked with the Signer DNA, and Wilkins had opted the Wellcome Library,4 I was approached by Dr Jane to work with another supply he had recently obtained Gregory, of University College London, who was in America from Erwin Chargaff. Unfortunately, the then assisting Wilkins in the final stages of preparing supply from Chargaff did not crystallise, and it could the manuscript of his autobiography for publication. not be pulled so readily into long fibres. Wilkins Wilkins urgently wished to obtain a copy of the letter decided that the solution to his impasse was to obtain he had written en route to Zurich. He was especially a new supply from Signer for himself, and it was for interested in the sketch he had drawn on its first page. this that he was travelling home via Switzerland on the Although most of the text of this letter had been 3 The Mendel Newsletter extensively quoted by Olby and by Judson in their On 8 December, 1976, Robert Olby wrote to Crick’s published accounts, and thereby had been in the public secretary, prompted by a letter he had received from domain for many years, Wilkins’s freehand sketch of Wilkins: the helical diffraction pattern had not been reproduced by either writer. It was this visual ingredient that Professor Wilkins wrote to me asking for Wilkins was particularly interested in publishing. (In copies of the letters which he wrote to Dr Crick the spring of 2003, the National Library of Science in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and which I referred to project to digitize many of Crick’s papers – including in my book The Path to the Double Helix.
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