Cold Spring Harbor Audio Visual Collection

Processing the Cold Spring Harbor Audio Visual Collection was a unique experience due to the volume and scope of the Collection. The Collection overall consists of 4,950 pieces of media, in 11 different formats and takes up about 130 linear feet of shelf space, depending how you count it. It was grouped by format but hadn’t been looked at in years, which meant that old inventory lists, if they existed, were no longer accurate.  I had to start over cataloguing the media which took about 165 hours.  Keeping the Collection grouped by media made sense on one level (as opposed to grouping by subject matter) because much of the media was not readable and the processing often became a game of “Name that obsolete Format”.  Below is a photograph of the Analog Video Formats.  

I learned that at the time of recording the formats were considered state of the art.  Now we, as an Archive, are unable to read or view what is on the tapes. eBay is full of players and recording devices and there are blogs which lament the demise of the Hi-8 tape.  But the lessons ring through loud and clear.  We as Archivists prepare Disaster Plans to prevent and manage threats to our collection.  Typical threats are leaky pipes, electrical shorts and poor storage climates.  

But isn’t the real threat to our collection the possibility of losing our information?  Behold the Type C Helical Film Reel and let us go forth and regularly assess our formats for compatibility and retrieval.

- Amy Driscoll, Project Archivist

Watson returns to Italy

Above is a newsclip of Dr. Watson that aired this past weekend in Italy.  At age 84 he is still traversing the globe, delivering lectures on his famous discovery, as well as his current scientific passion, the future of cancer research.  Watson has a long-time connection with Italy.  Salvador Luria was Watson's mentor at the University of Indiana and introduced the young graduate student to the wold of phage research.  That would lead Watson to his first summer at Cold Spring Harbor, where he remains to this day.  It was at Indiana that he met another famous Italian scientist, Renato Dulbecco.  Dulbecco would go on to work with Joseph Sambrook at the Salk Institute in the late 1960s, who would then go on to be Watson's Assistant Director at CSHL for almost 20 years.  These type of connections abound in the scientific world.

Manny Delbruck and Salvador Luria at CSHL in 1953

In April 1951 Watson traveled to Italy for the first time, to spend two months at the Zoological Station at Naples.  It was here that Watson took in a talk by Maurice Wilkins on the structure of DNA.  Towards the end of his talk he presented a new X-ray photograph of DNA -- this fateful image would prove to Watson that the nucleic acid had a regular structure, and therefore the structure could be deciphered using the standard methods: a combination of X-ray crystallography and/or model building.  The wheels started turning in his brain, and two years later he and Francis Crick (with much needed insight from Rosalind Franklin's famous X-ray photograph) "discovered" the helical structure of DNA -- and unraveled the "secret of life."

This time around Watson only stayed a few days in Lo Stivale, delivering 3 talks before flying off to Cyprus.  And the never ending lecture tour continues...

Building the Foundation of Modern Cancer Research: Four Decades of Discovery within the MIT CCR

The Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT recently released a short film documenting the history of its predecessor institution, the Center for Cancer Research (CCR). The film features contributions from both Dr. James D. Watson and former CSHL scientist and Nobel Laureate Dr. Phillip Sharp. The CCR was founded in 1974 by Salvador Luria (who was also one of Watson's early mentors) and has been at the forefront of cancer research ever since.