Two complete journal issues of Nature, Vol. 171, comprising: (1) No. 4356, 25 April 1953, containing the three papers under the common head-title ‘Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids’: WATSON & CRICK, ‘A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,’ pp. 737-738; WILKINS, STOKES & WILSON, ‘Molecular Structure of Deoxypentose Nucleic Acids,’ pp. 738-740; and FRANKLIN & GOSLING, ‘Molecular Configuration in Sodium Thymonucleate,’ pp. 740-741.(2) No. 4361, 30 May 1953, containing WATSON & CRICK, ‘Genetical Implications of the Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid,’ pp. 964-967.
London: Macmillan, 1953. First edition, rare, journal issues in the original printed wrappers, of the four papers by which the double-helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid was announced to the world and its implications for heredity set out. The 25 April 1953 issue of Nature carries, under the common head-title ‘Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids,’ three successive papers of a little over a page each: the Watson-Crick paper proposing the double helix with antiparallel sugar-phosphate backbones and complementary base-pairing; the Wilkins-Stokes-Wilson paper reporting the X-ray diffraction evidence that the B-form of DNA is helical; and the Franklin-Gosling paper giving the X-ray diffraction evidence that is in fact decisive for the helical structure, including the famous oxygen positions and fibre-diagram symmetry that Watson and Crick had used, in Franklin’s absence and without her permission, to arrive at their model. Five weeks later, in the 30 May issue, the Watson-Crick paper ‘Genetical Implications of the Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid’ sets out what the two 1953 issues together amount to: that the sequence of bases along the double helix is the carrier of hereditary information; that the complementary structure of the molecule itself supplies the mechanism by which this information is copied from one generation to the next; and that mutation can be understood, for the first time, as a change at a single, localisable position in the molecule. For this body of work Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; Franklin, who had died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at the age of thirty-seven, was not named. The two issues together are listed in One Hundred Books Famous in Medicine as item 99, in Dibner’s Heralds of Science as item 200, in Norman as 534, and in Garrison-Morton as 256.3, 256.4, 256.8, 752.1, and 752.7, reflecting the five distinct discoveries it is possible to cite them for. The problem the papers solved had been on the agenda of biology for eighty-four years. In 1869 the Swiss physiological chemist Friedrich Miescher, working in Felix Hoppe-Seyler’s laboratory at Tübingen, had extracted from the nuclei of pus-coated surgical bandages a substance of unprecedentedly high phosphorus content, resistant to the proteolytic enzymes of the day, which he had named ‘nuclein.’ Miescher and his successors had correctly predicted that a whole family of such phosphorus-rich substances would be found to exist, equivalent in rank to the proteins, but the physiological role of the nucleins had remained unknown for the rest of the century. In 1944 Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty, at the Rockefeller Institute, had established through the pneumococcal transformation experiment that the hereditary material of the cell—the ‘transforming principle’—was not, as most biochemists had expected, a protein but was Miescher’s nuclein, now understood chemically as deoxyribonucleic acid. Through the following decade the basic chemistry of DNA was worked out: Alexander Todd at Cambridge had established the phosphate-sugar backbone; Erwin Chargaff at Columbia had discovered, from 1950 onward, that in DNA preparations from any source the molar ratio of adenine to thymine and of guanine to cytosine is always one to one, though the A+T to G+C ratio varies between species. These were the data. But what arrangement of atoms produced them, and how the arrangement could act as the carrier of hereditary information through the generations, remained entirely obscure. Two groups in England were applying X-ray crystallographic methods to DNA by the start of 1951. At the Medical Research Council Biophysics Unit at King’s College London, under Sir John Randall, Maurice Wilkins had initiated a programme of X-ray diffraction work on DNA fibres; he was joined in late 1950 by Raymond Gosling, then a graduate student, and in January 1951 by Rosalind Franklin, a physical chemist with substantial experience of X-ray crystallography obtained in Paris. The working relationship between Franklin and Wilkins broke down almost at once over a misunderstanding about responsibilities—Randall had verbally placed the DNA work in Franklin’s hands without informing Wilkins, who continued to believe it his—and Franklin, with Gosling, worked largely independently through 1951 and 1952. In May 1952 Gosling took, from a well-hydrated fibre of the B-form of DNA that Franklin had prepared, the X-ray photograph that is item 51 in Franklin’s laboratory notebook and that is now among the best-known images in the history of science; it shows, from the central cross of spots and the pattern of absences on the layer lines, that the B-form of DNA is an antiparallel double helix with ten residues per turn. By the winter of 1952-1953 Franklin had deduced the space group, the helical parameters, and the antiparallel disposition of the two chains. The one feature she had not yet determined was the base-pairing. At the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, twenty-two-year-old Francis Crick had returned to graduate study in 1949 after the war and was applying the helical diffraction theory of Cochran, Crick, and Vand (1952) to a variety of structural problems; the twenty-three-year-old American James Watson arrived at the Cavendish in October 1951 from a postdoctoral position in Copenhagen with the explicit personal intention of solving the structure of DNA. The two met, agreed that the structure was the central problem of biology, and set out to solve it by the model-building method Linus Pauling had developed for protein α-helices in 1951. Neither Watson nor Crick was formally assigned to DNA, which was King’s territory under an informal British inter-laboratory convention; they nevertheless pursued the problem on and off through 1951 and 1952, producing in late 1951 a disastrously wrong three-stranded model with the phosphate backbones on the inside that Franklin, visiting Cambridge to see it, demolished at a glance. For most of 1952 Watson and Crick were explicitly forbidden by Sir Lawrence Bragg, the Cavendish director, to work on DNA; the injunction was lifted, and their attention returned, only in late January 1953, when Linus Pauling’s three-stranded model of DNA—also with the phosphates on the inside and structurally as mistaken as their own had been—reached Cambridge in manuscript via Pauling’s son Peter, then a Cavendish graduate student. The race was now public. Three further elements fell into place in February 1953. First, Maurice Wilkins, in a visit to Cambridge on 30 January, showed Watson a print of Franklin’s Photograph 51 and the data summary accompanying an MRC progress report in which Franklin had reported her antiparallel two-chain interpretation of the B-form pattern; the showing was without Franklin’s knowledge, permission, or subsequent acknowledgement by Watson or Crick in print until the mid-1960s. Second, Jerry Donohue, a visiting American physical chemist from the California Institute of Technology who shared the Cavendish office with Watson and Crick that year, pointed out that the tautomeric forms of guanine and thymine given in the then-standard textbooks of chemistry—forms in which Watson had been trying to build pairings of like-with-like—were wrong, and that the correct keto tautomer positioned the hydrogen-bond donors and acceptors very differently. Third, on the morning of 28 February 1953, Watson, shifting cardboard cut-outs of the four bases in their corrected keto forms on his office table, saw that adenine paired with thymine by two hydrogen bonds, and guanine with cytosine by three, produced two base-pairs of essentially identical external dimensions, fitting neatly between the two helical backbones at every point of the rise. Chargaff’s one-to-one ratios, Franklin’s antiparallel double helix, and the base-pairing specificity required by any genuine copying mechanism were, at a stroke, simultaneously accounted for. Crick, arriving later that morning and verifying the geometry, is reported by Watson to have announced to the lunchtime patrons at The Eagle pub on Bene’t Street that they had ‘found the secret of life’; Crick himself had no memory of any such announcement, though he did recall telling his wife Odile that evening that they seemed to have made a big discovery (she, he later said, did not believe a word of it, having heard similar announcements before). Sir Lawrence Bragg and Sir John Randall agreed, in early March, that the three papers should appear simultaneously in Nature under a common head-title, with the Watson-Crick theoretical proposal first, followed by the two King’s X-ray papers that constituted its experimental support. The three were submitted at the beginning of April and appeared together in the 25 April issue, the Watson-Crick paper illustrated with a single schematic drawing of the double helix by Odile Crick, and bearing the celebrated closing sentence—the most-quoted single understatement in twentieth-century biology—that the specific base-pairing they had proposed ‘immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.’ The elaboration of that suggestion is the content of the second Watson-Crick paper of 30 May, in which the two authors explain the model ab initio for readers who had not seen the April papers and then pursue its genetic consequences. ‘Any sequence of the pairs of the bases can fit into the structure,’ they observe; the precise sequence along a given double helix is therefore a quantity that can carry an essentially arbitrary amount of information, and given the sequence on one strand, that on the other is exactly determined by the base-pairing rules. Replication can accordingly be understood as a separation of the two strands followed by the templated re-synthesis of a complementary strand on each; mutation can be understood as a rare tautomeric misreading of a base at the moment a complementary strand is being laid down, producing a single-base substitution at a specific position in the sequence. The May paper contains, for the first time in any biological literature, a molecular theory both of heredity and of its errors. The reception of the papers, despite retrospective accounts, was neither immediate nor uniform. The 25 April paper accumulated only a modest number of citations through 1954 and 1955, and was widely read as a speculative structural proposal rather than as the settled truth of the matter. The three essential external confirmations arrived only by stages. In 1958 Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl, at Caltech, demonstrated by density-gradient centrifugation of 15N-labelled E. coli DNA that DNA replication is semi-conservative, as the complementary-template mechanism of the May paper required. In 1961, Sydney Brenner, François Jacob, and Meselson established the role of messenger RNA as the intermediary between DNA and protein synthesis; in the same year, Crick, Brenner, Barnett, and Watts-Tobin demonstrated the triplet reading frame of the genetic code; in 1966, Nirenberg and Matthaei at the NIH completed the mapping of the sixty-four codons to their amino acids. By the middle 1960s the double helix, the triplet genetic code, and the central dogma of molecular biology (DNA → RNA → protein) were the settled paradigm of the new field, and the 1953 papers were—retroactively—the foundation texts of that field. Watson, Crick, and Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Rosalind Franklin had died of ovarian cancer on 16 April 1958, at the age of thirty-seven, before the importance of her 1952 X-ray work had been publicly acknowledged by either Watson or Crick, and before the Nobel Prize committee would consider her—Alfred Nobel’s will having at that time been interpreted as excluding posthumous awards. The reassessment of her contribution has been the central revisionary task of the historiography of the field since Anne Sayre’s 1975 biography, and has been pressed furthest in the Brenda Maddox biography of 2002. The technological and scientific consequences of the 1953 papers are, at this point, commensurate with the foundations of any other science. Recombinant DNA methods (Cohen and Boyer, 1973) required as a precondition only the base-pairing specificity described in the papers here offered; so did DNA sequencing (Sanger, 1977; Maxam and Gilbert, 1977); so did the polymerase chain reaction (Mullis, 1983); so did the Human Genome Project, completed in 2003 at the fiftieth anniversary of the papers. The entire biotechnology industry of the last half-century, the whole of forensic DNA profiling, and every modern account of the molecular basis of inherited disease rest in the end on the structural proposal in the April 1953 paper and its genetic elaboration in the May paper. No other pair of scientific publications of the twentieth century has generated so large a secondary literature or so many technological descendants. Franklin’s case takes its place within a pattern recognisable across the twentieth century. The 1925 Harvard dissertation of Cecilia Payne had shown that stars are predominantly hydrogen and helium — a result her external examiner Henry Norris Russell prevailed upon her to describe in print as “almost certainly not real”, and independently confirmed and published under his own name four years later. The theoretical account of nuclear fission worked out by Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch in December 1938 underwrote Otto Hahn’s Naturwissenschaften paper of 6 January 1939 reporting the experimental demonstration; Hahn alone received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The systematic name for this pattern is the Matilda effect, coined by the historian of science Margaret Rossiter in a 1993 paper in Social Studies of Science after the nineteenth-century American suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage, whose 1893 essay Woman, Church and State had argued for the first time that the under-recognition of women’s scientific work was systematic and not incidental. The Franklin reassessment, which began with Anne Sayre’s 1975 Rosalind Franklin and DNA — written partly in answer to the unflattering portrait of Franklin in Watson’s 1968 memoir The Double Helix — was carried decisively forward by Brenda Maddox’s 2002 Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, drawing on the Franklin papers at Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, and on the Randall papers at King’s College London. The fiftieth-anniversary observances of 2003 saw a King’s College memorial lecture by Aaron Klug (a former Franklin postdoc and 1982 Nobel laureate in chemistry), the renaming of one of the King’s College biophysics buildings as the Franklin-Wilkins Building on the Waterloo campus, and the institutional acknowledgement, fifty years after the event, that the unauthorised transmission of Photograph 51 from King’s to the Cavendish in late January 1953 was the decisive informational act of the discovery. Issues of Nature from 1953 in the original printed wrappers, when matched as a two-issue 25 April + 30 May set, are uncommon at any auction venue and rare in commerce; OCLC records the bound half-yearly volume of Nature Vol. 171 in some 250 institutional libraries worldwide, but only a handful of those holdings preserve the original wrappers, and original-wrapper sets in private hands are now scarce. Recent precedents at first-rate venues include several Christie’s and Sotheby’s appearances of the 25 April issue alone (most often in modern presentation cases) but the matched two-issue set in original wrappers is the rarer item. References: Grolier Club, One Hundred Books Famous in Medicine, 99; Dibner, Heralds of Science, 200; Norman 534; Garrison-Morton 256.3, 256.4, 256.8, 752.1, 752.7; Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation (1979; expanded ed. 1996), pp. 145-156, 184-185; Olby, The Path to the Double Helix (1974; repr. 1994); Watson, The Double Helix (1968); Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (2002); Sayre, Rosalind Franklin and DNA (1975); Francis Crick Papers, National Library of Medicine, profiles.nlm.nih.gov. Two journal issues, 4to (253 × 178 mm). Both in original printed pale buff wrappers, the Nature masthead at the head of the front wrapper and the ‘Supplement: Recent Scientific and Technical Books’ banner across the upper third; stab-stapled as issued; lightly toned with minor chipping and a few short edge tears at the extremities, contents fresh and clean. Each issue housed separately in a custom folding case with green cloth quarter-spine and cream paper boards, printed paper label on the front board.
Item #6690
Price: $13,500.00
