The papers of the pioneers of modern genetics, including former Glasgow professors Guido Pontecorvo, Malcom Ferguson-Smith and James Harrison Renwick, have been collected together for the first time and made freely available in a £3.9million digitisation project by the Wellcome Library.  

‘Codebreakers: makers of modern genetics’ contains over a million pages of first-hand notes, letters, sketches, lectures, photographs and essays from the circle of brilliant minds responsible for uncovering the structure of DNA that includes the likes of Francis Crick, James D. Watson, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin.

The site lays bare the personal and professional thoughts, rivalries, blind alleys and breakthroughs of the scientists whose ideas transformed our understanding of the matter of life.

Drawing on five partner archives in America, London, Cambridge, and Glasgow and the Wellcome Library's own holdings, Codebreakers offers an unparalleled and comprehensive primary resource for researchers and curious minds across the world and is launched ahead of the 60th anniversary of Crick and Watson's seminal Nature paper revealing the structure of DNA.

It holds the stories behind the discovery which has shaped our genetic age, from diagnosis to drug development, forensics to food production, and which lies at the heart of today's biomedical research.

The vast collections contain both iconic documents, such as Crick's preliminary sketches of the double helix and Franklin's x-ray diffraction 'photo 51', and everyday exchanges; complex research notes and personal ephemera.

The Glasgow papers within the Codebreakers project includes:

  • The Guido Pontecorvo (1907 - 1999) Collection, including research material, correspondence, lecture notes and slides, from the 1940s to the 1990s.
  • The James Harrison Renwick (1926-1994) Collection, dating chiefly from the period of Renwick's human genetics research from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s.
  • The Malcolm Ferguson-Smith (1931-) Collection, dominated by very substantial correspondence dating from 1957 onwards.

Codebreakers sits within an entirely redesigned Wellcome Library website, and a new media player allows for the close reading, downloading and embedding of digitised files. The content is free to all, and users can log in using Library membership, facebook or twitter accounts. A timeline and essays on key individuals and research groups offer navigational aids through the records.

Codebreakers is a collaborative project, uniting collections from five internationally important centres.  Working with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Churchill Archives Centre Cambridge, the University of Glasgow, King's College London and UCL (University College London) the digitised papers of James D. Watson, Rosalind Franklin, Sydney Brenner, Lionel Penrose, J.B.S Haldane, Guido Pontecorvo, James Harrison Renwick, Malcolm Ferguson-Smith and Maurice Wilkins have been made available.

They join material from the Wellcome Library's own holdings including the papers of Francis Crick, Fred Sanger, Arthur Ernest Mourant, Peter Medawar, Hans Grüneberg, Honor Fell and Gerard Wyatt.

Simon Chaplin, Head of the Wellcome Library says: "Codebreakers reveals the extraordinarily convoluted networks of influence, insight and inspiration which lie behind  critical moments of scientific discovery. It is a project made possible by a creative partnership with five outstanding libraries and archives, sharing a goal of free and open access.  Together, our collections offer an extraordinarily rich research resource documenting one of the most significant periods of scientific innovation in human history."

Codebreakers is accessible at wellcomelibrary.org/codebreakers

 

For more information contact Tim Morley at the Wellcome Trust on 0207 611 8612 or t.morley@wellcome.ac.uk or Stuart Forsyth in the University of Glasgow Media Relations Office on 0141 330 4831 or email stuart.forsyth@glasgow.ac.uk

 

Notes to Editors

Further information on Glasgow’s genetics pioneers can be found within the University of Glasgow Story: http://www.universitystory.gla.ac.uk/search/

About Wellcome Library

Wellcome Library is one of the world's major resources for the study of medical history, and provides access to a growing collection of contemporary biomedical information resources relating to consumer health, popular science, biomedical ethics and the public understanding of science. The Library is situated within Wellcome Collection, a free visitor destination for the incurably curious. Located at 183 Euston Road, London, Wellcome Collection explores the connections between medicine, life and art in the past, present and future. www.wellcomecollection.org<http://www.wellcomecollection.org>

Wellcome Library is part of the Wellcome Trust a global charitable foundation dedicated to achieving extraordinary improvements in human and animal health. It supports the brightest minds in biomedical research and the medical humanities. The Trust's breadth of support includes public engagement, education and the application of research to improve health. It is independent of both political and commercial interests.  http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/

 

 

First published: 4 March 2013

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