DNA and Social Responsibility: Cataloguing the personal papers of Maurice Wilkins (1916-2004)

Will the archives of the future be made of the strand of DNA?

The prospect of combining archives and DNA feels like a plotline of a Twilight Zone episode. What's exciting however is that it is a distinct possibility. The Guardian have just released a story about the DNA inscription of a book ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/aug/16/book-written-dna-code) initially reported in the US journal, Science. The book composed of 53,000 words includes eleven images and a computer program. The 5.27 megabit collection of data created over several days was produced by Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School.

The method they used, in principle, was the same as digital inscription: encoding all the book information into a binary sequence. The DNA base pairs in this case representing 1's and 0's with Arginine (‘A’) and Cytosine (‘C’) representing zero, and Guanine (‘G’) and Tyrosine (‘T’) representing one. The team developed a system in which an inkjet printer embeds short fragments of artificially synthesized DNA onto a glass chip. Each DNA fragment contains a digital address code that denotes location within the original fiDNAle.

What makes DNA such a brilliant medium for storage is its data storage with estimates suggesting a gram of DNA can store 455 billion gigabytes. The data is easily readable and copied and maintains its stability for several thousand years.

The possibilities are fantastic. To put this in perspective, most digital formats require an upgrade after five years with physical data storage such as DVDs having, at most, a twenty year life span. This is because of the constant change in informational software packages within sturdy digital formats, such as TIFFs and PDFs having 10-15 year maximum life span. A DNA code sequence is therefore more desirable than a digital approximate, but neverless it is an exciting development and will potentially rival the paper record revolution in record keeping. This is an exciting archival perspective.

As a cataloguer and digitiser of the DNA related material of the Kings college London archive such a development is one of a personal joy. It would feel wonderfully apt to have the papers charting the discovery of the structure of DNA are encoded into DNA for future generations.

August Project Update

The project is entering its final months and a quick update as it what has been happening is in order:

To date, 24,000 images have been produced by our digitisers which roughly breaks down as 4000 glass plate and acetate images and 20,000 images from the paper collection. Over the next two months the remaining part of the paper collection will be scanned. Sections that have already been scanned include papers from Wilkins’ early life, scientific working papers, correspondence with scientific colleagues, papers associated with the history of the research on DNA and sections of his autobiography.

Above, is a low resolution copy of some of the images that are being produced. The example is a postcard received by Maurice Wilkins from Francis Crick dated May 1955 and sent from Paris. The postcard reads: "Having a lovely time telling people about your work and my ideas! Hoping to see you in Cambridge for a quiet weekend - Francis".

Our main tasks over the next few months involve the construction of metadata and copyright and sensitivity checking. The latter is the most time consuming as a detailed survey requires a systematic check of all potentially risky material. Our catalogue descriptions are written at a level to summarize the contents of the physical file but because the images will be accessible individually an item level approach to sensitivity and copyright is needed to be certain that legally and ethically all necessary precautions are taken before publishing on-line. Needless to say this process is time-consuming and has proved to be the most taxing element of the project.

Apart from the construction of metadata and the sensitivity checking the only other main strand of the project to update everyone with is outreach. The project continues to gather interest from its social media sites (like the one I’m writing on now). Besides the blogs, the project has had a presence on Twitter and new images have been added to the project’s Flickr site. In May, the archives participated in a Radio 4 piece on the Wellcome Digital Library which was reported previously on this blog. Alongside this, we were privileged to have been visited by Raymond Gosling in March as part of a television documentary. It was wonderful to meet a contemporary of Wilkins and Franklin and hear from one of the key workers his own experience working at King’s at the time. We are quite fortunate to have a copy of Gosling's original 1954 PhD thesis, titled ''X-ray diffraction studies of Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid' which has been selected to be digitised as part of the King's College London Biophysics collection.

New Flickr set of Digitised Glass Plate Images

A new Flickr gallery showing some of the images that have been included in our current digitisation project is now available. The images have been selected from the glass plate negative series (KDBP/1/1) which contain a number of images documenting x-ray diffraction and other physical studies into DNA. The series dating from 1949 to 1984 contains significant landmark diffraction patterns of DNA including early crystalline A-and semi-crystalline B-forms in particularly 'Photo 51' created by Rosalind Franklin. Along with x-ray patterns there are also model representations of the structure and graphical representations of the King's team's findings.

The new Flickr set can be found in the link below:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/51665752@N04/sets/72157630717145856/

KCL and the Foundations of Modern Genetics: The Library of Maurice Wilkins: Part 2

KCL and the Foundations of Modern Genetics: The Library of Maurice Wilkins: Part 2: In this second instalment regarding the personal library of Maurice Wilkins, I have selected a number of books from the collection and ...

The library of Maurice Wilkins

“A personal library is an X-ray of the owner’s soul. It offers keys to a particular temperament, an intellectual disposition, a way of being in the world. Even how the books are arranged on the shelves deserves notice, even reflection. There is probably no such thing as complete chaos in such arrangements.”

- Jay Parini, American writer and academic (b 1948-)

As part of the acquisition of Maurice Wilkins personal papers for the King’s College London archives, the family also donated an extensive part of his private library. This generous gift contains a plethora of non-fictional material ranging from his scientific career in biophysics to later work in nuclear disarmament. The collection, consisting of books, booklets, pamphlets and journal articles, can be found within the Archives Reading Room in the Strand Building and occupies ten shelves. As the above quotation states, a personal library can be a window to the owner’s soul and the Wilkins library collection certainly conveys a sense of Wilkins’ range of interests.

The collection contains journal articles and leaflets from a number of publications. Some relate to his scientific career with off-prints from the Journal of Molecular Biology, while others reveal his interest in the relationship between art and science. Also included are a series of annual booklets from the Nobel Prize organisation, listing prize winners.

The published books cover a diverse number of subjects but can be broken down into the following categories:

Science: life sciences, genetics, physics and biographical material

History: mainly the history of science, but also of ancient Greece, the Renaissance and the political and scientific history of the twentieth century

Psychology and Philosophy: psychoanalysis and how the mind works, also alternative therapies and eastern philosophy, in particular the practice of yoga

Anti-nuclear: relating to the anti-nuclear movement, disarmament, nuclear conflict.

Anyone for Vegetarian Athletics?

The Vegetarian Brothers

Whilst, trawling through the autobiographical section of the personal papers of Maurice Wilkins I came across a remarkable pamphlet,"Vegetarian Athletics (What they prove and disprove)" by Henry Light, produced by the Vegetarian Society, features the semi-naked vegetarian wrestling champions, S V and E H Bacon mid-bout.

The pamphlet was part of the collected papers of Edgar Wilkins, Maurice's father, who was himself a committed vegetarian and keen exerciser. Trained as a doctor at Trinity College Dublin, he later concentrated on public health and preventative medicine and had a life long interest in the effects of diet and exercise on health. His papers were collected as part of Maurice Wilkins' autobiographical research, originally to provide the reader with a framework of how family characteristics were passed down through the generations.

In the first page of 'Vegetarian Athletics', Henry Light dispels the myth that vegetarians can "merely exist" but can be lusty and thrive. He states that there is a "great paucity of vegetarian athletes as compared with the innumerable host of flesh-eaters in the land, and thus realise that the numerical odds against us are analogous to those of a small village pitted against the entire nation. How often should we expect that little village to win? Once in a thousand years perhaps. Yet we vegetarian, competing for scarcely more than a thousand weeks, have secured amongst our innumerable triumphs the following formidable list of WORLD and NATIONAL RECORDS and CHAMPIONSHIPS [followed by a list of athletes and their achievements]"

The twelve page pamphlet makes interesting reading not only through its content but its wonderful use of language especially when describing non-vegetarians as "flesh-eaters" or lines such as "before coming a vegetarian he was an epileptic". It provides examples from recent times of world and national record holding vegetarian athletes similar to the wrestling brothers on the front. In some cases it provides a detailed break down of their diet such as Eustace Davies, mountain climber:

"Whilst training, except when visiting friends, his food consisted chiefly of:

Breakfast: Bread and butter, hot milk, potato, green salad and oil, and sometimes an egg.

Lunch and dinner: Cheese, Bread, butter, potatos, green salad and oil, milk-pudding, and stewed fruit and cream.

The food used during the performance itself was principally of a liquid nature. For the first ten hours it was egg and milk. Thereafter milk and soda, lemon water, some tea and egg, and once or twice milky tea at inns in the valleys. Also stewed fruit and cream and milk pudding at three places; and two oranges."

Davies was quoted by the author saying: "I owe you a great debt of gratitude; your advice was acted upon in toto, and I do not know of any other system of feeding on which I could have done the trick".

The pamphlet is interspersed with general advice on the merits and practicalities of vegetarianism and also the initial difficulties a former "flesh-eating" athlete might encounter when he first switches to vegetarianism. Henry Light at one point warns: "Before starting on a vegetarian system of living, one should be thoroughly convinced not only of its superior ethical value but its practicability, and be thoroughly determined after starting, for the mind has so great an influence over the body that the slightest wavering or doubt usually spells failure, and failure of course brings discredit upon the cause and oneself".

DNA and Social Responsibility: Cataloguing the personal papers of Maurice Wilkins (1916-2004)

Will the archives of the future be made of the strand of DNA?

August Project Update

New Flickr set of Digitised Glass Plate Images

KCL and the Foundations of Modern Genetics: The Library of Maurice Wilkins: Part 2

The library of Maurice Wilkins

Anyone for Vegetarian Athletics?

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