Transgene

Blog content

n November 2016 Miguel Garcia-Sancho, James Lowe and I attended the Workshop on Scientific Archives organised by Anne Flore-Laloë, archivist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg. The meeting brought together tens of archivists from Germany, France, Switzerland, UK, US and Canada. The workshop presentations focused on best practices in cataloguing and making accessible collections relevant to the study of twentieth-century science and technology. Archivists also addressed the challenges faced in establishing record management policies for the scientific institutions in which they work.

For our research project on medical translation in genomics, we were particularly interested in the archival collections curated by the workshop speakers, Frank Norman (Francis Crick Institute), Mila Pollock (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archive) and Jenny Shaw (Wellcome Library). The collections curated by Pollock and Shaw are especially valuable for genomics due to the role that Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Wellcome Trust had in the development of the discipline. In particular, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Centre (now renamed Sanger Institute) took part in all the sequencing projects – human, pig, and yeast – that we are investigating, and the personal papers of its former researchers, archived by the Wellcome Library, can offer precious materials for our investigation on genomics. 

Giuditta Parolini, November 2016

EMBL, Heidelberg Campus. Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EMBL_campus_Heidelberg.jpg