Following the successful digitisation
of Raymond Gosling's PhD thesis, 'X-ray diffraction studies of Deoxyribose
Nucleic Acid' I have added a few of the images onto the project’s Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/51665752@N04/sets/72157631533614623/ .
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| (KDBP/5/1) |
As I have already stated in the previous
posts, Gosling was a vital worker in the King's effort to solve the structure
of DNA. His PhD provides an excellent record of the experimental work going on
at King’s - not only in terms of x-ray diffraction crystallography on the
Signer DNA but the initial diffraction studies on sperm heads; the microscope-based
work occurring simultaneously on nucleic acids and descriptions of model
building, theoretic analysis of data and apparatus design are also described.
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| (KDBP/5/1) |
The source, from an archival perspective, is
‘visually exciting’. Scientific records tend to be fairly cryptic with significance often hidden within the text or captured
in a graph or table. The photographic prints within the thesis give a clear
linear progression of the diffraction pattern that were being obtained at
King’s. Broadly speaking, it is possible to see the improvement of images as
the old x-ray equipment was discarded for the finer focus camera and x-ray tube
and the presence of an expert crystallographer, in the form of Rosalind
Franklin at the helm.
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| Front cover of Raymond Gosling's PhD thesis (KDBP/5/1) |
You can now access for free Raymond Gosling's thesis, via the Wellcome Digital Library- here. You can also search for other digital material relating to Raymond Gosling and other King's DNA workers via the Wellcome Library catalogue, as well as access collections from other archives relating to the history of modern genetics.
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