March 1, 2013 6:25 pm

Sixty years of DNA

An astonishing archive of personal and theoretical material about genetics is to be placed online by the Wellcome Library

Early sketch of DNA double helix, 1953. Francis Crick’s pencil drawing shows a right-handed helix and the nucleotides of the two strands
©Wellcome Library
James Watson (left) and Francis Crick. At the Cavendish Lab, Cambridge, shortly before their discovery
©Cold Spring Harbor Library
‘ I have started up a general offensive on nature’s secret strongholds’: Maurice Wilkins writes, too late, to Francis Crick
©Wellcome Library
‘I think you will be interested to know that our dark lady leaves us next week’: Maurice Wilkins on his King’s College colleague, Rosalind Franklin (above)
©Rosalind Franklin Archive
‘I like the idea’: Maurice Wilkins writes to Francis Crick in March 1953, congratulating him but admitting he had been ‘a bit peeved’ to be beaten to the discovery of the double helix
©Wellcome Library
Magic formula: Diagrams and annotations by Francis Crick in support of his notes on the structure of DNA, 1953
©Wellcome Library
Structure for DNA: First page of a draft paper by Crick and Watson on the structure of DNA that was published in the April 1953 issue of Nature
©Wellcome Library
‘The more closely we examine a natural object, the more beautiful, exciting and mysterious it becomes’: Honor Fell, pictured above in her laboratory in Cambridge, c1950
©Wellcome Library
Honor Fell cell drafts,1919-20: Embryology and cytology drawings featuring a section of tail from a newly hatched skate
©Wellcome Library
Fell’s laboratory: Honor Fell ran the Strangeways Research Laboratory in Cambridge from 1927 to 1970
©Wellcome Library
Rhoda Erdmann’s Berlin lab, 1929: Honor Fell described Erdmann (pictured, above left, looking into the microscope) as ‘one of the most distinguished figures in cell biology during the twenties and early thirties’
©Wellcome Library
‘Medawar has a physical appearance and manner which are almost uncannily suited to a man of distinction’: Jim Watson describes Nobel Prize winner Peter Medawar (above, in 1969)
©Wellcome Library
Thomas Cox at work digitising the archives
©Wellcome Library

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