Welcome to the new archive project blog relating to the digitisation of material from the papers of Maurice Wilkins and the Biophysics Department. This project forms part of the major digitisation initiative by the Wellcome Trust to create a digital resource on the theme of “Modern Genetics and its Foundations”. The Wellcome Digital Library will provide digital access to its substantial genetics historical collections including the Francis Crick papers along with those of other partner organisations such as King’s. In particular, this project will bring together for the first time the papers of the four main protagonists in the discovery of DNA: Alongside the Wilkins and Biophysics Departmental papers of Kings College London will be the papers of the Francis Crick, James D Watson (Cold Spring Harbor) and Rosalind Franklin (Churchill Archive, Cambridge).
Altogether, King’s College Archives will provide over 31,000 images of archive material including:
- · KCL Department of Biophysics: glass plate and acetate x-ray images, 1949-1965
- · Papers of M H F Wilkins: relating to scientific research, 1948-1965, chiefly in DNA, including: notes on the various animal sources of the DNA samples used, laboratory notebooks recording the readings obtained the x-ray diffraction images, with related data set created on the IBM 650 computer and documents interpreting the DNA data, including graphs, Fourier transforms, Bessel Wave functions, sketches, calculations, measurements and diagrams.
- · Wilkins’ draft notes, 1955-1959, for presentations on progress of the Biophysics Unit’s DNA research
- · Research reports for the academic years 1954-55 and 1957-58, summarising the work to date on the structure of DNA, with additional manuscript notes
- · Wilkins’ contemporary correspondence with fellow DNA researchers and article co-authors, both UK and internationally, 1948-1968, including Francis Crick, Herbert Wilson, Leonard Hamilton, Boris and Harriet Ephrussi, and others, with comment on the progress of DNA research at KCL and elsewhere
- · Correspondence with and about James Watson, 1966-1969, detailing Wilkins’ negative response to draft versions of Watson’s autobiography, The Double Helix
- · Established draft sections of his autobiography, 1992-1994, countering accusations of sexism in his attitude towards Rosalind Franklin, and related published and unpublished material relating to Franklin, 1951-1999, including a copy of her experimental notebook on x-ray diffraction studies, annotated by Wilkins.
The blog site will provide an insight into the procedures and issues raised in digitising a large archival collection and follow on from the previous project blog, DNA and Social Responsibility (http://dnaandsocialresponsibility.blogspot.com/) by highlighting some of the documents we encounter during the course of the project and writing mildly amusing/interesting posts about the subject (this is our aim but it’s not a guarantee).
As a sign off I wish to illustrate some of the fantastic images that are being produced by the digitisation team.
