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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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The cataloguer’s conundrum
The Wellcome Library is very pleased to announce that the third and final batch of Francis Crick’s scientific papers is now fully catalogued and available for research. The entire archive has recently been imaged as part of the library’s Wellcome… Continue reading
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‘The Beauty of Diagrams’
On 16th December, BBC4 broadcast the most recent episode of their series The Beauty of Diagrams, in which mathematician Marcus du Sautoy explores the stories behind some of the world’s most familiar and influential scientific diagrams. The latest featured diagram… Continue reading
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Tour de Francis
The preparation and photography of the Francis Crick archive have provided the digitisation team with a rare and intimate glimpse into the life and thoughts of the Nobel-prize winning scientist. What prevails is a pragmatist, a prolific correspondent, a man… Continue reading
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The Dark Lady of DNA
Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born 90 years ago today, on July 25 1920. Franklin was a biophysicist who produced the now famous x-ray of a DNA molecule known as Photo 51 when she worked at King’s College, London in 1951.… Continue reading
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Human Genome Project and the Wellcome Library
The first draft of the human genome, announced jointly by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton on 26 June 2000, was heralded by the press as a massive scientific breakthrough, the applications of which would improve health and extend life. Scientists… Continue reading
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Images That Changed the World
Over the last week, BBC Radio 4 have broadcast Images That Changed the World, a series in which Dr Mark Lythgoe explored the development of medical imaging techniques and their wider cultural influences. The five episodes explored X-Rays, Brain Scanning,… Continue reading
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Proteins and Prizes
Wellcome Image Award winner and current Wellcome Trust grant holder, Venkatraman (Venki) Ramakrishnan, has been named as one of the winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2009. Venki’s computer-generated molecular model of a ribosome, showing its 3D structure in… Continue reading
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25 years of DNA Fingerprinting
Today, the DNA fingerprint is 25 years old. Wellcome Images holds a photo of the original autoradiograph, discovered by Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys in his lab at Leicester University, where he still works today. This image, acquired in 2005, represents… Continue reading