In the summer of 2002, large wooden cases containing filing cabinets arrived from California at the Wellcome Library. Within the filing cabinets were thousands of documents: the first batch of papers from Francis Crick’s professional archive.

The acquisition of Crick’s papers brings a high-profile and important collection of modern papers to the Wellcome Library’s contemporary scientific archives. Francis Crick is one of the outstanding scientific figures of the 20th century. Not only did he and James Watson discover the structure of DNA in 1953, but he also went on to make seminal contributions to the development of molecular biology and in 1976 moved to the Salk Institute in California and switched his focus to neuroscience and brain research (a few of his achievements are highlighted in the timeline; see box below).

The Wellcome Library already has more than 600 discrete collections of 20th-century papers, from organisations or individuals who have been important in biomedicine or biomedical policy making. The collections include papers from Marie Stopes, Sir Peter Medawar, and the Eugenics Society, yet the Crick archive is arguably the centrepiece of the collections, as it is part of the primary documentation of what was happening in the unravelling of DNA and all that followed in the field in the 1950s and 1960s.

Acquiring the archive

The idea of the Crick papers first arose in 2001, when word reached David Pearson, Head of the Wellcome Library, that a private collector in the US had contacted Crick with a view to acquiring his archive. "As a key public repository of important biomedical papers, we contacted Crick - and he was immediately interested in our involvement," says Pearson. "We sent two professional valuers - one from London and one from California - to look at the material and to assess its commercial value. They came back with very positive reports, and it was obvious that the archive was very interesting and very important."

After negotiation, a purchase price of US$2.4 million for Crick’s entire professional archive was agreed (slightly less in fact than he was being offered by the private collectors). As the archive is a key part of UK scientific heritage, the Wellcome Trust went to the Heritage Lottery Fund, which can provide funding to support the acquisition of important items like this for the nation. It agreed to fund half of the purchase costs so that the archive could come to London.

Meeting Francis Crick in California reinforced David Pearson’s pleasure in the acquisition. "I think he genuinely felt that the material was coming to a good home," he says. "He was pleased that his work was being recognised as a piece of national scientific heritage, and that it was going to an appropriate repository that would look after the archive and make it accessible."

In the archive

With the arrival of the first two tranches of material, Chris Beckett, special collections archivist at the Library, could start investigating the collection. The contents of the filing cabinets filled 110 boxes, which will take until the end of 2003 to catalogue.

"You don’t really know what’s in the boxes until the job is done," he says. "But cataloguing is a cumulative process, so as you get further in to the job, things begin to make more and more sense, you begin to make connections, and to see the significance of names."

The two largest sections in the collection appear to be correspondence - from fountain-penned letters of the 1940s and 50s to modern-day laser print - and meetings and travel notes. This reflects the importance of correspondence to Crick, the extent that he was on the road, in particular in the 1960s.

"In the correspondence you can see how theory and new developments are progressing," says Beckett. "It’s a subtext beneath the published papers. And the meetings and travel notes hint at a community of scientists of the era, who met regularly, communicated widely. There seems to be a spirit of cooperation."

Several interesting finds have already emerged from the thousands of papers. These include draft versions of the first and most famous Watson and Crick paper ‘Molecular structure of nucleic acids: a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid’ (published in Nature in April 1953) and of their second paper, published a month later, in which they set out a model for the replication of DNA. Also present is a copy of the 1955 ‘Note to the RNA Tie Club’ - described by Crick as his "most influential unpublished paper" - in which he predicts the existence of transfer RNAs.

Wider access

Once the cataloguing is complete, the details will be accessible via the Wellcome Library’s website, and historians and writers will be able to use the papers in their research. "From a purely scientific standpoint, I think that people will want to look at the way in which Crick’s thinking and his scientific theory developed," says David Pearson. "The story of the unravelling of the structure of DNA is a good story in itself. But the second half of his career, working on brain research in California, is much less well known. The archive will allow people to explore this era."

Other writers and researchers are likely to approach the archive from a biographical point of view. "Crick is not just a scientist who produces scientific papers," says Pearson. "He has been involved in various types of controversy, not only through his evangelical atheism, but also through being involved in some eugenist-type debates and issues in the late 1960s. People may well want to find out about Crick the man, and about the other people who were working with him."

The size and scope of the archive is such that it may well take years for it to be explored fully. But Francis Crick’s remarkable achievement will make such effort worthwhile says Pearson: "Without fail, everything you read and hear about Crick says that he was the key thinker taking forward the development of molecular biology in the late 20th century. The archive will allow us to find out even more about a key era of scientific history."

Selected parts of the Crick archive are currently on display in the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine.

Related links

• The Crick papers: A selection of pages from the Francis Crick Collection shown online on the Wellcome Trust’s Human Genome website
• Crick papers project: Overview and progress of the cataloguing
• Reading room display of various pages from the Francis Crick Collection in the Wellcome Library. The display is part of the ‘Four Plus: Writing DNA’ exhibition which runs until 29 August 2003
• Press release (31 March 2003): Francis Crick’s controversial archive on first public display in major exhibition to celebrate 50th anniversary of discovery of structure of DNA