Archives and Manuscripts cataloguing - August 2010

August saw the completion of several long-running projects, with newly catalogued collections and retroconverted catalogues both entering the online database for the first time. Several thousand new records were made available for searching, chiefly relating to twentieth-century collections.

Our first highlight this month (already described more fully in an earlier blog posting) is an indication of how up-to-the-minute archives can be and a valuable addition to our holdings on genetics, complementing the hard science with information on its human impact. Genetic Alliance UK is an umbrella organisation bringing together various groups representing persons affected by genetic conditions (the initial impulse came from a member of the Huntington's Disease Association, whilst in its first years it was run on a voluntary basis by a member of the Tuberous Sclerosis Association): it was founded in 1989 as the Genetic Interest Group and adopted its new name in June this year. It deals, then, with very current issues and the archives include material created only a few months ago. The papers total four boxes (50 database records) and include minutes and agendas of the society's AGMs, Trustee Board and Operational Group, annual reports, and newsletters and publications produced by the society, either alone or in conjunction with other groups. The papers are available under the reference SA/GIG.

In the 1980s the Library received a small collection of papers relating to the work of the biochemist Norman Heatley (1911-2004) and his work as part of the team that developed penicillin; these were made available under the reference GC/48. At the end of Heatley’s life a much larger amount of material was given to the Library, transforming the original single box into a collection filling thirty: this new material has now been catalogued and the original GC/48 merged with it, to form a large new collection with the reference PP/NHE. A fuller description of the papers is to be found in a blog posting by their cataloguer.

A letter by the great cricketer (and general practitioner) W.G. Grace (1848-1915), previously held in the Library’s old Autograph Letters Collection, was added to the online catalogue. It includes information on one of his younger brothers, who is about to take an exam at the Royal College of Surgeons: Grace discusses with the College how to minimise the effects of his exam nerves. The letter can be consulted using the reference MS.8746.

As noted last month, work continued behind the scenes on the papers of the psychiatrist Henry Dicks (PP/HVD) and on a project to expand the amount of material catalogued and available that relates to Wellcome Witness seminars on various topics in medical science (GC/253). Work also continues on a radical expansion of the catalogue of the papers of the geneticist Professor Hans Grüneberg (PP/GRU) which will make available much more detailed information about his individual correspondents. For the moment, the original catalogue of the Grüneberg papers has been taken off-line to avoid creating confusion: contact the archives and manuscripts department to access this material.

Last month's cataloguing highlights mentioned that the retroconversion project, which aims to convert all the Library's old hard-copy archive catalogues to database form, is coming very close to completion. We mentioned then the catalogue of the Abortion Law Reform Association, which completed retroconversion in the final hours of July and went live very early in August, adding 758 new records to the database. The archive includes records of the Association, its officers, and individuals connected with the attempt to reform the abortion laws, plus various associated materials such as papers of Chairman Janet Chance, and, following the passing of 1967 Act making abortion legal, papers of the 'Lane' Committee on Working of the Aberdeen Act and Abortion Amendment Bills. Its reference is SA/ALR.

In an allied area, the catalogue of the Birth Control Campaign was also converted. The 257 new records for searching document the work of the Campaign and its parent body the Birth Control Trust, focusing in particular on Parliamentary action: topics addressed include wider availability of vasectomies, free provision of contraception under the NHS, and general improved NHS facilities for contraception, abortion and sterilisation. There is also a large section of press cuttings, and files relating to attempts to promote and publicise its aims and to relations with other bodies in connected fields. The papers can be found by searching for the reference SA/BCC.

Earlier we mentioned new cataloguing that relates to genetics: retroconversion also contributed to this theme, making available the catalogue of papers relating to the
Medical Research Council Blood Group Unit. Another 498 records were added to the database, the many scientific symbols used in the data leading to a considerable extension in the archivists' HTML abilities. The MRC Blood Group Unit succeeded the Galton Laboratory Serum Unit set up in 1935 under the direction of Professor (later Sir) Ronald Fisher and financed through the Medical Research Council by the Rockefeller Foundation (the need for safe transfusion therapy intensified blood group research in the run-up to the Second World War). The Unit was reconstituted in 1946 at the Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine as the Blood Group Research Unit, under the directorship of Dr Robert Race, and acquired an international reputation in the highly specialised field of haematology, extending its work in 1965 into the genetics of blood groups. Upon the retirement of Dr Race in 1973, Dr Ruth Sanger became director of the Unit. Under Dr Sanger's direction, the Unit continued to make a unique contribution to the identification of blood groups, and to the applications of the blood group systems to the problems of human genetics. The Unit was disbanded in September 1995, although its work continues in other research centres. This collection will be one of those to be digitised early as part of the Library’s focus on material relevant to the history of genetics; the data can be browsed under the reference SA/BGU.

Finally, the catalogue of the papers of Sir Edward Mellanby FRS (1884-1955) and Lady May Mellanby née Tweedy (1882-1978) was converted. The Mellanbys worked together in the field of nutrition, with particular emphasis on vitamins and deficiencies; in addition, Sir Edward was Secretary to the Medical Research Council from 1933-1949. The papers include personal material, correspondence, research notes, lectures and drafts, and add another 876 records to the database which can be found under the reference PP/MEL.

Images:
1/ screenshot of the website of Genetic Alliance UK.
2/ Lady Mary Mellanby and Sir Edward Mellanby in Kew Gardens, c.1950, from PP/MEL.

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Norman Heatley OBE (1911-2004) - The unsung hero of Penicillin

In May 1940 Norman Heatley applied for the Philip Walker Studentship in Pathology, University of Oxford. He wrote:

“Since October 1939 I have been helping Professor Florey (in collaboration with Dr E. Chain) in the investigation of the naturally occurring bactericidal agent “Penicillin”, which is formed by a certain species of mould. This material was first reported in 1929, but in spite of its obvious practical importance, --- for it seems to be completely non-toxic to mammalian tissues, --- practically no further work on it has been published. It is possible that during the last decade several people have begun work on this problem but have been discouraged by its apparent instability, or the difficulty of obtaining it, or the laboriousness of measuring its activity. During the last six months a technique has been worked out in this laboratory by which a steady and increasing supply of the material is assured; at the same time a method of assay many times quicker than that used previously has been evolved, and already a considerable purification of the active principle has been achieved. We have shown that enormous doses of the material can be injected intravenously into mice without harmful effects, and it is known that certain pathogenic bacteria are inhibited or destroyed by very low concentrations of it. At worst, penicillin will be a valuable bacteriological reagent for the isolation and cultivation of certain difficult bacteria; at best, it may turn out to be a therapeutic agent of the highest immediate importance (e.g. for the treatment and prevention of infection in war wounds)” (Letter contained in PP/NHE/B/2/3).

The way in which Heatley, (as part of the team that developed penicillin), continued the “investigation of the chemical, pharmacological and bacteriological properties of penicillin” and the enormous impact the results had on millions of lives throughout the world is documented in the recently catalogued Heatley archive.



Originally consisting of just one box of material, listed and deposited in the Wellcome Library in the early 1980s (and given the collection reference GC/48), the collection was greatly enlarged by the donation of additional material from Mercy Heatley, following her husband’s death in 2004. Now comprising 30 boxes and catalogued with the collection reference PP/NHE the Heatley archive informs researchers in three main regards: it records the career of Norman George Heatley, biochemist and experimental pathologist; it forms an important source of original and retrospective material on the history of penicillin and antibiotics; undoubtedly, it conveys Heatley’s exceptional skills as a scientist as well as his personality - meticulous, modest, courteous and infinitely helpful.

The collection includes:
• Norman Heatley’s laboratory research notebooks, including those recording
breakthrough work with Howard Florey on the therapeutic effects of penicillin, in Oxford May 1940 (see PP/NHE/A/2/1/4).
• Correspondence and papers relating to Heatley’s work in the USA during 1941 and 1942 on the development of penicillin and promotion of its large scale production.
• Notebooks and papers relating to Heatley’s other biochemical research work, including his design and development of a new microrespirometer from the 1930s onwards, research on non-ionic detergents in the early 1950s, work in Oxford on Staphylococcal Delta-Haemolysin in the mid-1960s, and secondments to laboratories in the USA to work on secretin and pancreozymin, 1962-1963 and 1968.
• Publications and writings by Norman Heatley spanning his entire career.
• Publications and writings by scientists working in the same field notably series of articles by Howard Florey and by Edward P Abraham and other scientists based at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford.
• Section C, entitled ‘Telling the Story of Penicillin’, comprises material collected by Norman Heatley during his lifetime, much of which was generated via his contribution to or participation in antibiotic related histories, anniversaries, exhibitions, publications and broadcasts. As such, Section C may be of particular interest to those who wish to study the ways in which the discovery, development and history of penicillin and antibiotics has been recounted and portrayed in various media.

The catalogue of the Heatley archive can be searched online at through our archives and maunuscript catalogue and the papers are available to researchers at the Wellcome Library from 18 August 2010.

Stop Press: The Heatley archive is scheduled for photography as part of the Wellcome Library Digitization Project, 'Modern Genetics and its Foundations', between mid-September 2010 to mid-April 2011 and will be unavailable to library users during that period. Researchers who wish to consult the collection before Spring next year should therefore hurry along to the Wellcome Library within the next few weeks!

Images:
1 - Photograph of Norman Heatley, used in a BBC News article on Heatley
2 - Illustration of apparatus used for producing penicillin (PP/NHE/A/2/1/5)

Author: Amanda Engineer

Archives and Manuscripts cataloguing - July 2010

Our archive cataloguing during July was chiefly dominated by on-going projects rather than the release of new records to the database: although several of those projects will appear very shortly, some as early as August’s round-up. One very small collection was catalogued swiftly and released on the same day: various items of correspondence, mostly undated, by the author and medical man Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) (MS.8744).

The papers of the biochemist Norman Heatley (PP/NHE) will be released in the very near future: cataloguing is completed and what remains is the final editing of the catalogue and the necessary physical processing (boxing up, labelling and so forth). As mentioned in a recent blog post, this will tell another side of the penicillin story to that given in the recently-retroconverted papers of Sir Ernest Chain (PP/EBC).

Behind the scenes, work continued on the papers of the psychiatrist Henry Dicks. In addition, under the heading of new cataloguing, we can include a radical expansion of the catalogue of the papers of the geneticist Professor Hans Grüneberg (PP/GRU) which will make available much more detailed information about his individual correspondents.

A project is also under way to expand the amount of material catalogued and available that relates to Wellcome Witness seminars on various topics in medical science – the fruits of this will appear in the near future as GC/253.

The retroconversion project to convert all our old hard-copy archive catalogues to database form moves ever closer to completion. This month saw the release of the catalogue relating to Sir Graham Selby Wilson (1895-1987), bacteriologist (PP/GSW). Wilson’s particular research areas were the Salmonella group of bacteria, brucellosis and tuberculosis, milk hygiene and the control of diphtheria. His papers include biographical information, research materials, lectures and material on his academic career in Manchester and at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and papers on the setting up and operation of the wartime Emergency Public Health Laboratory Service (PHLS), of which Wilson became Director in 1941, continuing as Director of the peacetime service until retirement in 1963.

Also of particular note is the collection of papers from the Abortion Law Reform Association (SA/ALR), whose catalogue completed retroconversion and checking during the final hours of July and went live on Monday August 2nd – these will be mentioned in more detail in next month’s round-up.

In addition, behind the scenes retroconversion work also continued on various collections such as the Medical Research Council’s Blood Group Unit (SA/BGU) and the Birth Control Campaign (SA/BCC).

Image: Sir Graham Selby Wilson, the catalogue of whose papers was released to the database this month. Photograph from Wellcome Images.

Another link completed: Sir Ernst Chain's papers made searchable

Our programme to convert all archive catalogues to electronic form passed another milestone this month, with the release to the database of our single largest remaining collection. The papers of the biochemist Sir Ernst Boris Chain (1906-1979) comprise some 67 boxes of widely varied documentation; the catalogue, written in the early 1980s, came to three hefty volumes of typescript.

Chain is best known for his work on penicillin, for which he shared the 1945 Nobel Prize for Medicine with Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey. Fleming had made the initial observation of penicillin’s properties in 1928, noting that it produced substances that killed bacteria; however, its instability had ruled out its use as an antiseptic, his initial hope, and he had not thought of its use to cure bacterial infections.

The turning point came in 1935, when Howard Florey became Professor of Pathology at Oxford: convinced that pathologists and chemists could co-operate fruitfully, he invited Chain to develop a department of biochemistry in the University’s Sir William Dunn School of Pathology. In 1938 the two men decided to turn their researches towards three anti-bacterial substances produced by micro-organisms, one of them penicillin. A third member of the team, Norman Heatley, made crucial practical suggestions as to how the substance could be extracted and purified. (It has been argued that Heatley should also have shared in the Nobel Prize and would have done had not the rules restricted joint recipients to three; his own papers are currently undergoing cataloguing at the Wellcome Library and readers will be able to judge for themselves when this material is released.) In 1940 animal tests showed that small quantities of penicillin could protect against bacteria introduced into the bloodstream, and suddenly a property that had seemed a mere curiosity when spotted by Fleming turned into a crucial weapon of war, with major collaborative efforts put into the manufacture of penicillin by the Allies. Chain worked with British and American scientists on an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to synthesise articificial penicillin; another collaborative effort was the Therapeutic Research Corporation, in which five major pharmaceuticals manufacturers, including the Wellcome Foundation, came together "to accelerate the research and production of pharmaceuticals during the war years and in particular the production of Penicillin" (the records of the Corporation can be seen in the archive catalogue under the reference WF/TRC).

If this were all there was to say about Chain his papers would already be well worth consulting. However, there are many other points of interest in Chain's long and dramatic life, which his papers illustrate. Before starting work with Florey at the age of thirty he had already come through hardship. As his name suggests, he was born in Germany – his family were Jewish, and his father, the industrial chemist Dr Michael Chain, had been born in Russia. The family had known considerable financial hardship when Michael Chain died in 1919, but it proved possible for Ernst to study at the University of Berlin, graduating in chemistry and physiology in 1930 and moving on to take a doctorate in the Charité Hospital Institute of Pathology's chemistry department (a foreshadowing of the way the two disciplines would meet in Oxford later in his career). All this while he was also exploring the possibility of making a career in music: he performed as a pianist and wrote newspaper music criticism. During the early 1930s Chain began to conclude that his real flair was for science but it was of course political developments that turn out to be decisive in the shaping of his career rather than his own choices: the Nazis' advent to power in 1933 prompted Chain to leave Germany for England, where he worked under Sir Gowland Hopkins at Cambridge, obtaining a second doctorate, before the crucial invitation to join Florey in Oxford.

Chain's papers reflect this multi-national element. Early material documents his studies in Germany, his flight from the country and arrival in the U.K. as a refugee. After the war, his relationship with Florey deteriorated – the familiar story of disputes over priority and credit for discoveries – and in 1948 he moved to the Istituto Superiore de Sanità in Rome, before returning to England in 1961 to take up the chair of Biochemistry at Imperial College, London. All phases of his later career are represented in the papers, including copious correspondence: Chain was fluent in English, German, Russian, French and Italian, and his papers – in these and other languages - show the wide range of his contacts across the world of science and industry. A cursory scan down the names of his correspondents in section K of the archive indicates the breadth of his social and professional networks: there are major scientific figures like Linus Pauling and Richard Doll; less stellar names whose work can be fleshed out by other papers held in the Library (for example, the pathologist and cancer researcher Sir Alexander Haddow or the nutritionist Thomas Latimer "Peter" Cleave, both of whose own papers are held in the archives department); and other figures whose fame lies outside the fields of science or medicine, such as the Labour MP and founder of the National Health Service Aneurin Bevan, to whom Chain wrote several times in the late 1940s and early 1950s (at a time when the Labour Party was in opposition and Bevan at loggerheads with some other leading figures in the party, Chain declared himself Bevan’s “loyal follower”).

The beauty of having all this information in a database, of course, is that all these names – and many other terms – become accessible to the reader searching across the whole archive collection, not necessarily knowing in advance that this individual had any contact with Ernst Chain at all. This increase in accessibility is certain to mean increased use for the collection as a whole, and in particular for the areas of it that deal with areas of Chain’s career other than the 1940s penicillin work for which he is most famous. Getting all this data accessible online is the culmination of a long process. For some months the Library Administrator, Tracy Tillotson, worked on rekeying this entire catalogue into a spreadsheet for loading into the database (a process described in an earlier blog post), fitting this into whatever spaces might open up between her many other duties. The data created in this way was loaded in early June and the whole catalogue is now searchable online, coming to just under 2400 new database records. The sheer size of the collection is brought into focus when one searches the database on reference PP/EBC: even when displayed in brief, single-line hitlist style the records fill 48 web pages. Our brief description here only gives a taste of the material newly searchable: readers are invited to log onto the archives catalogue and make their own explorations.

Note (September 2010): this posting refers to the papers of Norman Heatley as undergoing cataloguing and shortly to be made available. We are pleased to announce that the Heatley papers have now been released to the public: a description can be read here and the catalogue browsed in the Wellcome Library archives catalogue under the reference PP/NHE.

Images, from top:
1/ Ernst Boris Chain around the time of his Nobel Prize, from file PP/EBC/A.226
2/ Early penicillin-manufacturing equipment, from file PP/EBC/B.18
3-4/ Diagrams for a lecture on "The chemical structure of the penicillins", showing synthesis and degradation, from file PP/EBC/B.38.

Breaking the Mould

As part of their War Beneath the Skin season, BBC4 last night broadcast Breaking the Mould: The Story of Penicillin.

Details:

"Whilst it is widely recognised that Alexander Fleming was the man who discovered penicillin, the truth is a bit more complicated than that and the extraordinary story of Professor Florey is hardly known.

Set against the background of the early years of the Second World War, this factually-based drama shows how it was Professor Florey and his team who persevered against incredible odds to make penicillin an applicable medicine, whilst refusing to patent it for commercial gain.

A revealing, poignant and witty character-driven account of a miraculous scientific breakthrough, Breaking The Mould tells the little known story of Professor Florey and the team of unsung heroes from the prestigious Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford University who were behind the discovery of penicillin, that changed the world of medicine forever".

A number of the Wellcome Library’s archive collections have a direct link to the story of penicillin’s development. These include the papers of Norman Heatley, including his laboratory notebooks and correspondence with Florey; Ernst Chain, who shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology applied to Medicine with Fleming and Florey; and Sir Edward Mellanby, Secretary of the Medical Research Council during the period, and an important figure in connecting the disparate research communities working in this field.

That the mass production of penicillin in this country was achieved during the Second World War was due in no small part to the creation in 1941 of the Therapeutic Research Corporation (TRC), a consortium of five leading UK drug companies. One of the members was the Wellcome Foundation Ltd, and the papers relating to the involvement of the company in the TRC are part of the Wellcome Foundation Archive.

Breaking the Mould is available to watch through the BBC’s iPlayer.