The letters were written during a 26-year period when Crick informally guided the progress of molecular biologists around the world in establishing how DNA operates in living cells. An article on the letters was published Wednesday in the journal Nature, focusing on those related to the discovery of DNA’s double helix structure in 1953.
“We are really between forces that may grind all of us to pieces,” the physicist Maurice Wilkins wrote after a disastrous attempt by Crick and his colleagueJames D. Watsonto build a model of DNA based in part on data gathered by Rosalind Franklin.
Ignoring the intimations of doom, Crick responded to Dr. Wilkins in flippant style, referring to his poaching another lab’s problem and to his friend’s inability to get along with his colleague Dr. Franklin.“So cheer up and take it from us that even if we kicked you in the pants it was between friends,” Crick wrote in December 1951.“We hope our burglary will at least produce a united front in your group!”
Crick’s scientific career was delayed by wartime work designing mines, and at the time he was studying for his Ph.D. atCambridge Universityand was not supposed to be working on DNA at all. The problem belonged to Dr. Wilkins at the University of London. But he, too, was sidelined because the head of his laboratory, John Randall, had made him give up his DNA material and graduate student to a new hire, Dr. Franklin.
The debacle of the wrong structure was set up by Dr. Watson, who had attended a lecture Dr. Franklin gave about her work on DNA but misremembered a critical measurement. Based on it, he and Crick built a model of DNA’s structure and proudly invited the London group up to Cambridge to inspect it.
Dr. Franklin saw immediately that it was mistaken and pointed out the error. Worse consequences were to follow. Hearing of the failed attempt, Dr. Randall complained to Lawrence Bragg, the head of Crick’s laboratory. Dr. Wilkins’s fear of“forces that may grind all of us to pieces” was not misplaced: Dr. Bragg told Crick to get back to his thesis work and stop building models of DNA. The ban was reversed a year later only when Dr. Bragg learned that Pauling, his longtime rival, was also hot on the trail of the DNA structure.
Crick’s correspondence during the formative years of molecular biology was long thought to have been destroyed. Crick told others in 1976 that an overly tidy secretary had thrown all his early letters away. His colleague Sydney Brenner, with whom he shared an office in Cambridge for 21 years, believed the same. Dr. Brenner once showed the author Horace Judson boxes of his unsorted correspondence, explaining it had survived, unlike Crick’s, only because he had been too lazy to file it.“And that’s why the girl never destroyed it,” he said, Mr. Judson reports in his book“The Eighth Day of Creation.”
But it turned out the secretary did not destroy Crick’s correspondence. Dr. Brenner, who is now at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., recently donated all his files to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, where Dr. Watson still works. Looking through Dr. Brenner’s archives, Alex Gann, director of the laboratory’s publishing unit, recognized that they included Crick’s missing correspondence, which evidently had not been discarded but merely was commingled with Dr. Brenner’s papers.
Dr. Gann and Jan Witkowski, director of the Banbury Center at Cold Spring Harbor, write in their article in Nature that the recovered correspondence“gives us a more nuanced sense of the interactions between the principal players in this most famous of scientific stories.”
Robert Olby, a historian of science at theUniversity of Pittsburghand Crick’s authorized biographer, called the rediscovered trove“a rich source of passages that are the live words of the actors at the time, spoken in the heat of the moment.” Dr. Olby’s biography,“Francis Crick, Hunter of Life’s Secrets,” was published last year, its subject having forbade its appearance during his lifetime.
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