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Sir Michael Stoker’s letters
The recent death of the cell biologist Sir Michael Stoker (1918-2013) prompted me to see if his name appeared in our digital archives. It does. I found a number of letters he wrote to other scientists, including Francis Crick, Jim… Continue reading
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Maurice Wilkins: glimmers of greatness
Here’s a tantalising glimpse into the Maurice Wilkins archive by Geoff Browell, Senior Archives Services Manager at King’s College Archives Services. This is another in our series on key figures in the history of genetics, who form part of the… Continue reading
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Haldane: a cantankerous and charismatic pioneer
Katy Makin, project archivist at University College London, provides some fascinating insights into the life and personality of J B S Haldane, one of the ‘Makers of Modern Genetics’ whose papers were digitised for the Codebreakers online resource. The original… Continue reading
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The Blood Group Unit – a world stage for research …
To mark World Blood Donor day, on 14th June, consider the work of some pioneers in blood research – the Medical Research Council Blood Group Unit (BGU). Robert Race (founder of the BGU) and his wife/assistant, Ruth Sanger, effectively opened… Continue reading
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Did Adam have 6 fingers?
Not many paintings are assessed for the genetic defects of the characters portrayed – Jan van Scorel’s version of Adam and Eve of 1540 is an exception. Geneticist Hans Gruneberg, whose digitised archive forms part of the Codebreakers: Makers of… Continue reading
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Fred Sanger: a maker of modern genetics
In the third of our series about the digitised archive collections in ‘Codebreakers: makers of modern genetics’, Jenny Shaw, archive project officer at the Wellcome Library, explores Fred Sanger’s research notebooks: My involvement with Sanger’s notebooks is through the Human… Continue reading
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60th anniversary of discovery of DNA structure
Today marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of Crick and Watson’s paper on the structure of DNA in Nature. In the published paper their assessment of the discovery was subtle though crucial: It has not escaped our notice that… Continue reading
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The Papers of Guido Pellegrino Arrigo Pontecorvo
In the second of our series introducing the digitised archive collections in the Codebreakers: makers of modern genetics resource, Dr Sam Maddra, archivist at the Glasgow Universtiy Archive Services introduces the Pontecorvo papers. The original papers are located at The… Continue reading
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“You will do just what I tell you” – the controversy of stage hypnosis
At Brighton hippodrome in December 1948, an 18 year old girl, Diana Grace Rains-Bath, volunteered to be hypnotized on stage by the Russian born American hypnotist, Ralph Slater who wrote the 1950’s classic book “Hypnotism and Self Hypnosis”. Duly rendered… Continue reading
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The dance of A, C, G and T: the Wyatt notebooks
Following the launch of Codebreakers: the makers of modern genetics online resource, we will be posting a series of blogs about the 20 digitised archive collections at its core. To get started, Dr. Chris Hilton, senior archivist at the Library… Continue reading