Will more data lead to different histories being told?

New technology is making information more widely available and, when it launches later this year, the WDL will make it easier to access historical evidence about the foundations of modern genetics.  Will this democratize our understanding of the history of genetics and lead to different versions of the history being told?

There is an African proverb which says that history is written by the hunter not the lion.  History inevitably simplifies the past and the selection process can be subjective.  When it launches the WDL will start to put 21 archive collections and around 2,000 books on-line.  The project is to digitise as much as we can rather than cherry pick the highlights. This means that the building blocks used by historians to piece together the past will be made freely available to a wider audience.  A lot of this material may seem like mundane workaday stuff. Users will have to wade through a lot of material to reach the bits they are interested in but this is probably a more accurate reflection of the scientific research process.

Flashes of genius are essential but they do not happen in isolation. Thomas Edison’s phrase about invention being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration applies to scientific research too. The discovery process needs both.

Watson and Crick were extremely clever to work out the helical structure of DNA but they did not get there simply because they were lone geniuses. Before they made their discovery a lot of people had spent years experimenting, writing and thinking about DNA. There had even been flashes of insight which ended up being wrong.I recently read a letter from Gerald Oster sent to Aaron Klug after Rosalind Franklin’s death, in which he recalled his time working in London. He reflects that even though he had much of the relevant information by early 1950 he lacked the insight to work out the structure of DNA.  This letter (FRKN/06/07/001-2) is held by the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge and a digitised version will become part of the WDL.

I am rather hoping that the WDL might help us to recognise that while flashes of inspiration are part of scientific discovery they are only possible because a team of other people paved the way.

Watson and Crick Letters

I've just had the privilege of reading a fantastic series of letters written in 1954 by James Watson and Francis Crick. They were written a year after they published their seminal article on the structure of DNA. In the letters the two men are exchanging ideas and their excitement shines through. They write about all sorts of things, for example, the importance of building space filling three dimensional models, confusion over how thymine fits into the helical structure and what the researchers at KCL are up to. In March 1954 Watson also expresses his frustration with the research process, “The whole thing is puzzling and paradoxical (for could DNA be wrong) and is slowly driving me to despair and to loath nucleic acids.” (PP/CRI/D/2/45)

I got to read them because last month the first batch of digitised material arrived from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, one of the five external organisations contributing digitized material to the WDL pilot project. The James Watson archive is held at Cold Spring Harbor and contains the letters written to him by Francis Crick. The letters Watson wrote to Crick are held by the Wellcome Library.

Later this year, when the WDL is launched, Watson and Crick’s correspondence will be digitally united. Lots of people will be able to read these letters (and lots of other stuff) online while the originals stay safely tucked away in their archival homes. I am excited about that!

Papers, papers and yet more papers … preparing the Crick Archive for digitisation

When first faced with preparing around 300 boxes of Francis Crick’s personal papers for digitisation, I have to confess my heart sank. A far cry from the last very visual digitisation project of 3000 AIDS posters, I was daunted, not only by the very different content of this collection, but the sheer size of it – an estimated half a million items this time. How wrong I was. I feel privileged to have been given the opportunity to delve into one of the most incredible minds of our lifetime.

Although we tend to associate him only with his (and Jim Watson’s) discovery of the double-helix sequence of DNA – and there is plenty of fascinating correspondence within the archive related to this - it is his research on the mind and consciousness in his latter years that is truly ‘astonishing’ as he would put it. Through his endless correspondence with both fellow scientists and the general public, we get a real sense of his probing analysis of what makes our brains tick.

It is very easy to get side-tracked from such a collection but I have to remember that my main task is to ensure the papers are in a suitable condition for the photographers to shoot: a daily scour of the collection is required to remove existing staples and flatten pages but occasionally a conservator is required. For example, Crick’s heavily folded (since 1955) tracing sketches and calculations of Collagen Long Spacings required specialist equipment to flatten out.

Once a particular batch has been checked, data spreadsheets are then produced for the photographers so that they know what to expect in each box – included in this data is an estimate of the percentage of OCR’able (Optical Character Recognition) text, a record of the current location of a particular batch and notes for the archivists’ attention. While doing this I cannot help but siphon off particularly interesting information which has and will continue to be used for publicity about the project – see the recent BBC Audio Slideshow.

Further blogs providing updates on the digitisation project will follow in due course.







Top image: Crick's sketch of genetic code, 1965 (PP/CRI/E/1/13/10)
Bottom image: Francis Crick lecturing at Cambridge University (PP/CRI/A/1/2/9)