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A hot-wax fingerprint Christmas card
How many Christmas cards will you send this year, if at all? The vogue for hand-crafted cards is gradually disappearing as we become ever more digital in sending out festive wishes each year. There is a particularly interesting example of… Continue reading
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The story of photograph 51
Photograph 51 is the title of a play on the London stage throughout autumn 2015. The play explores the controversy surrounding Rosalind Franklin and her contribution to the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. The discovery… Continue reading
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Lionel Penrose: a man of many talents
Katy Makin reveals some insights into the personality of the multi-talented geneticist Lionel Penrose from his personal papers, which have been digitised as part of the Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics online resource. Lionel Sharples Penrose (1898-1974) is best known… Continue reading
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Alan Coulson’s Science of Collaboration
The Alan Coulson papers (PP/COU) have recently been made available online as part of Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics. This means that the Coulson archive has the honour of being the first collection to be digitised straight from cataloguing and… Continue reading
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Welcome to Genomics History Week
With the first section of the papers of geneticist John Sulston now catalogued and the recent addition of the digitised Alan Coulson papers online at Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics, we’ve decided to make this Genomics History Week at the… Continue reading
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Francis Galton: a Victorian polymath
We have added two new digitised archive collections (Alan Coulson and Francis Galton) to the Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics online resource. Here, Katy Makin from the University College London (UCL) Special Collections team shares her experience of working with… Continue reading
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The rights to reproduction
To mark International Women’s Day on 8 March, here’s a 50 year old greeting from the archives that has some mystery about it. This card was sent to Carlos Paton Blacker (1895-1975): The reverse of the card says: “Warmest greetings… Continue reading
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Uncovering a scientific life in the archives
Leslie Barnett (1920-2002) was a microbiologist who worked with some of the top geneticists of the 20th century to help discover important advances in gene structure and function. Born in London as Margaret Leslie Collard she began her career in agriculture with… Continue reading
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The art of cytology: Honor Fell’s archive
In another of our occasional series introducing the digitised archive collections in the Codebreakers: makers of modern genetics online resource, Julia Nurse, Content and Metadata Officer at the Wellcome Library introduces the Honor Fell papers. The original papers are located… Continue reading
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Sex and Dr Joan Malleson
Dr Joan Malleson (1899-1956) worked in sexual health and fertility at a time when even talking about such topics could be a source of acute embarrassment. By all accounts Dr Malleson treated her patients with a great deal of understanding and compassion. She was… Continue reading