Our DNA heritage goes on the block

An archive that sheds light on a glorious period in British science is up for sale and could be broken up, reports Brenda Maddox

A unique archive of British scientific documents could soon return home from California. That is, if any British library or collector can meet the price. Christie's, New York, is seeking upwards of £1 ·3 million ($2 ·2 million)from its forthcoming auction of the Jeremy Norman Archive of Molecular Biology.

Jeremy Norman is a 55-year-old scholarly book dealer whose specialty is scientific and medical manuscripts. He has assembled the collection over the past few years, paying large sums to Nobel laureates such as Max Perutz and Sir Aaron Klug. The Norman collection, housed in his private library in a suburb of San Francisco, also includes material by or relating to other major names in molecular biology such as Francis Crick, James Watson, Dr Maurice Wilkins, Lawrence Bragg, Raymond Gosling, Dorothy Hodgkin and Sven Furberg.

When Norman's agent was scouring Britain a few years ago, the British Historical Manuscripts Commission was dismayed to see the original papers of work done in Britain and financed by public funds passing overseas into private hands. Last June, in an article on the Norman archive, the journal Nature quoted Klug's defence of his sale. As past president of the Royal Society, Klug might have been expected to leave his papers to a British library or to the institution where he has worked since the 1960s, the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge.

However, Klug said he''had been given assurances that the Norman collection is intended to finally be donated to a major academic institu tion in the United States where they would b securely kept and free access be given to researchers''. Nature also reported that Norman insisted that his collection would never be traded. But now it is to go on the Manhattan auction block on April 25.

The date of the sale is no accident. April 25 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication in Nature of the paper by James Watson and Francis Crick announcing the discovery of the double helix of DNA. Considered the greatest discovery in biology since Darwin, the event will also be celebrated with a banquet on April 23 in London, sponsored by the Royal Society, the Medical Research Council and Nature .

What seems to have changed Norman's mind, according to Francis Walgren of Christie's, is that he became''excited by the idea of a sale and doing it on the anniversary''. Also, the responsibility of holding such an important collection seems to have''weighed on him''.

The catalogue for the sale, which will be ready in about three weeks, will carry a scholarly introduction by Norman tracing the historical background of the study of genetics, X-ray crystallography, viruses and protein structure. It will also make clear the provenance of each of the letters and documents. Some of the correspondents may be surprised to see where their old letters have ended up.

Considerable interest at the sale will go to materials held under the name of the late Rosalind Franklin. Her April 1953 paper on DNA structure, written at King's College, London, with Raymond Gosling, also appeared in the Nature issue being commemorated. At the time of publication it was an embarrassment to the heads of both the Cavendish and King's laboratories that the experimental work that led to Watson's and Crick's discovery of the double helix at the Cavendish had been done, mainly by Franklin, at a rival institution, King's.

Watson, Crick and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel prize for the DNA discovery in 1962. Franklin, who died in 1958, was not eligible, for the prize is never given posthumously.

However, in recent years, as the facts of Watson's and Crick's quiet knowledge of her work have been revealed, she has been belatedly recognised as a co-discoverer of the double helix. (She has also become a feminist icon as an example of a gifted woman overlooked by the misogynist scientific establishment.)

Norman holds a fair amount of original Franklin letters, notes and other documents. He estimates that it is ''approximately equal in quantity and quality to the other primary archive of her scientific papers at Churchill College, Cambridge''.

Will Churchill College bid for the Franklin archive? Christie's hopes not''to dismember''the Norman collection. However, it may consider selling segments separately and values its Franklin holdings at £610,000. The Wellcome Trust is another possible buyer -perhaps for the entire collection. Last year, it reportedly paid £1 ·8 million for the papers of Francis Crick, who is now at the Salk Institute in California. The Heritage Lottery contributed £900,000 to the purchase. Thanks to the Perutz papers, the Norman archive sheds new light on the controversy surrounding the discovery of the double helix. Perutz, who was at the Cavendish at the time, was deeply stung by the suggestion in Watson's best-selling book, The Double Helix ,published in 1968, that in February 1953 h had improperly shown a Medical Council Research report containing Franklin's data to his friends. Perutz wrote dozens of letters trying to get support from fellow scientists to show that he had not volunteered the report but merely handed it over when asked, and that it was not marked confidential.

Sleuths of the true facts behind the discovery will also be intrigued by the Norman collection's early drafts of The Double Helix .Then entitled Honest Jim ,the manuscript drew angry demands for changes from those candidly mentioned, notably Wilkins, Crick and their American rival, Linus Pauling. ''Hopefully'',as a Christie's spokesman says,''this material will end up in a more permanent home''. He acknowledged that''back in the UK''was probably the ideal place.

Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox (HarperCollins)is available in hardback for £18.

Advance orders can also be taken for the paperback,
published in April for £7 ·99. To order either title, plus £1 ·99 p&p per order, please call Telegraph Books Direct on
0870 155 7222

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5 feb 2003