Archives

Last Friday famed molecular biologist Francois Jacob passed away.  Jacob, along with Andrew Lwoff and Jacques Monod, was awarded the 1965 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for identifying messenger RNA and their work on gene regulation.  This research was conducted during the golden age of molecular biology--the period from the late 1940s until the early 1960s when our understanding of genetics grew leaps and bounds.  Jacob described the tight-knit community of scientists at the time in an oral history interview for Web of Stories:

The following is another post in our series highlighting the collections that are being processed through the NHPRC Basic Processing Grant.

The Cold Spring Harbor Map and Blueprint Collection consists of topographical maps, architectural drawings, pencil drawings, pencil sketches, and blue prints of the grounds and buildings over the course of 140 years.

In 1976, Charles Sammis Robertson, who lived in Lloyd Harbor, about 5 miles from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, gave his estate on Banbury Lane, together with an endowment for its upkeep, to the Cold Spring Harbor Lab for use as a conference center.  This postcard, incorporating a photo taken by R. Meurer, captures the Charles Sammis Robertson House looking towards Coopers Bluff.

Poem by Richard O. Roblin III, who was a student of James D. Watson at Harvard University in the mid to late 1960s.

Digitized as part of the "Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics" project.

Dr. Watson has been in the news again lately after publishing a paper in the Royal Society's journal Open Biology.  In the paper Watson questions the benefits of anti-oxidants and criticizes the U.S.'s current "war on cancer."

Ever since Dr. Watson won his Nobel Prize in 1962 people have been seeking his autograph.  As part of our digitization project, I'm creating metadata for these autograph requests and I'm plugging names into the Library of Congress Name Authority File to see if anyone of interest pops up.  I often wonder if the people who wrote to Watson later went on to achieve anything of note themselves.  

One thing that I have learned about Dr. Watson as a writer is that he is not shy about sharing unfinished drafts with colleagues.  We have scores of letters from the likes of Paul Doty, Tom Maniatis, and Matt Meselson commenting on early versions of Avoid Boring People.  He also famously shared drafts of The Double Helix with Crick and Wilkins, who were, somewhat understandingly, appalled.

As part of the "Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics" digitization project, we will soon be making these letters freely available online for the first time.

I found one particular set of letters regarding an early draft of The Double Helix very interesting.  Watson had sent a copy of the manuscript to an acquaintance in the summer of 1965, who subsequently sent a series of letters back to Watson documenting her delight with the draft.  Her name was Suzanne Reeder, had just left Cambridge (Massachusetts), and was obviously close with Watson.  The letters start in July 1965.  She mentions attending a conference in Berlin, as well as meeting Odile Crick in Cambridge sometime earlier, before returning home to England.  Towards the end of the letter she indicates that she will be flying back to the states, and then asks for a copy of the book.

Processing the Cold Spring Harbor Audio Visual Collection was a unique experience due to the volume and scope of the Collection. The Collection overall consists of 4,950 pieces of media, in 11 different formats and takes up about 130 linear feet of shelf space, depending how you count it. It was grouped by format but hadn’t been looked at in years, which meant that old inventory lists, if they existed, were no longer accurate.  I had to start over cataloguing the media which took about 165 hours.  Keeping the Collection grouped by media made sense on one level (as opposed to grouping by subject matter) because much of the media was not readable and the processing often became a game of “Name that obsolete Format”.  Below is a photograph of the Analog Video Formats.

For the past year we have been digitizing documents from the James D. Watson and Sydney Brenner Collections as part of the Wellcome Library's  "Modern Genetics and its Foundations" project.  This includes all types of documents: letters, postcards, handwritten manuscripts, laboratory data, and even Watson's day calendars.  But the images I was most interested in come from Watson's extensive photograph collection.  

The photos document Watson's entire life, from his infancy to his 80s.  In fact, they go back even further -- the portrait above is of his father, James D. Watson, Sr., and was taken in 1897.  Take a closer look at the photograph and you will notice that little Jimmy is not seated on a chair, but is actually on his mother's lap!  Taking portraits was a much lengthier procedure in the 19th century, so mothers often hid beneath a sheet to comfort their children and keep them still throughout the photo session. The result is a slightly unsettling image of an infant held by a cloaked specter (known as "ghost mothers").

For more early images from the Watson Collection check out our Flickr page where we will be providing a preview of the photographs digitized as part of "Modern Genetics and its Foundations" project.

When word came that a hurricane was moving up the eastern seaboard and would soon wreak certain havoc all along the coast, we were prepared.  Our library is located directly on the Long Island Sound, so flood preparation plans were already in place.  The bottom shelf of our storage space is set several inches off the floor, but to be safe everything on those shelves were moved to designated safe rooms on the upper level of the library.  Our archives are also equipped with a storm door, a heavy iron door which can be bolted into place in case of emergencies.  It was locked tight by Sunday afternoon.  Luckily the archives remained dry throughout the storm, but if the worst case scenario had occurred, our disaster recovery plan provides us with the policies and procedures to effectively respond to the emergency.  All of the above was made possible with guidance provided by the NEH Preservation Assistance Grant.

 In early 2011 we were awarded the NEH grant, which provided funding for a two day preservation assessment by consultant Tom Clareson (of LYRASIS).  The weeks prior to his visit were spent reviewing the preservation policies and disaster plans of other institutions, and in an effort to not appear completely clueless, we drafted a disaster plan of our own.  Tom was happy to review our draft policies, and with his recommendations we finalized the disaster recovery plan that served us so well during the recent storm.