Page 98 - The Secret Museum

I saw the pencil sketch of DNA in the Wellcome Library, on Euston Road,

London. The drawing belongs to the Francis Crick archive, which is made up of
2,000 paper files (or 200,000 sides of text/images) amassed by Crick during his
career.

There I met Ross MacFarlane, research officer at the Wellcome Library, and he
showed me a selection of its treasures.

We began with the oldest thing there, the Johnson Papyrus, a piece of a book, or
scroll, from the fifth century AD. It was found in Egypt. It is the oldest surviving
illustration of a herbal. What’s a herbal? It is a book with names or drawings of
plants, usually with information about the plant as well – including its culinary,

aromatic, medicinal or hallucinatory powers, and sometimes legends associated with
it. In this case, the ancient, precious drawing is of a bluey-green comfrey plant.
Below it, in Greek, is an explanation of how the plant can be used for healing. This is
how herbalism developed: by trying out plants and seeing how they made you feel.
By trial and error the properties and medicinal uses of different plants were
discovered and passed on to others.

We also looked through a diary belonging to Robert McCormick, ship’s surgeon
and natural history expert on HMS Beagle. There is no mention of Darwin in the

entire diary. Ross suggested McCormick was probably rather cross that Darwin had
turned out to be such a natural history know-it-all, as that wasn’t the reason for him
being brought on board the Beagle. Darwin joined the expedition late in the day when
Fitzroy, the captain, decided he needed someone who knew about geology to come
and keep him company, someone, most importantly, who would pay his own way.
Darwin fitted the bill. Although I know he wasn’t a real geology pro because I
visited the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences in Cambridge – who own Darwin’s

rock collection from the Beagle – and they showed me a diary of Sedgwick’s, in
which he mentions taking Darwin on a quick expedition to give him a crash course in
geology just before he set sail.

I also looked through an early guide to swimming written by a Cambridge don in
Elizabethan England, and a letter written by the antiquarian Sir Hans Sloane, who
collected the countless treasures that became the basis for the British Museum
collection. In the letter, he talks about a door that leads from his garden into a coffee
shop designed as a cabinet of rarities, where he went to chat over coffee with other

local pals who were interested in new ideas and discoveries. I wondered whether he
would mention chocolate, for he introduced drinking chocolate to Britain in 1687. He
didn’t. But you’ve probably tasted something similar to his blend; ‘Sloane’s Milk
Chocolate’ recipe eventually passed into the hands of Cadbury’s.

Then I came to a white file filled with photographs, scientific papers, personal
letters and musings. Ross pulled out the sketch. I instantly recognized the spiralling
ladder that carries the Earth’s variety of life forms. The image was sketched in 1953,
84 years after Johann Friedrich Miescher discovered DNA in 1869.