SCOLAR furthers online access to key sources in the history of genetics
7 January 2011
SCOLAR, Special Collections and Archives, has been awarded over £150,000 in grants from the Wellcome Trust to provide online access to the personal archives and book collections of key geneticists of the twentieth century.
Although human and medical genetics is a comparatively new field of scientific endeavour, it is one that has already had a considerable practical impact on our lives and will have a huge bearing on the future health and well-being of humanity.
SCOLAR's funding has enabled a project (taking place during the 2010 – 11 academic year) to preserve the archives of contemporary genetic scientists. Two senior archivists from the National Cataloguing Unit for the Archives of Contemporary Scientists (NCUACS) are undertaking this work.
This project includes preserving the archives of Professor Sir Peter Harper of Cardiff University, a distinguished clinical geneticist who has pioneered the field of the history of human and medical genetics, and the project is also cataloguing the archives of:
- Professor John Hilton Edwards, who is credited with the first description in 1960 of trisomy 18, the Edwards syndrome.
- Dr George Robert Fraser, Senior Research Fellow at the Imperial Cancer Genetic Clinic from 1984 to 1997. He is credited with the identification of Fraser's syndrome in 1962.
- The Medical Research Council's Human Biochemical Genetics Unit at the Galton Laboratory at University College London – the staff of the Unit identified over 30 new enzyme polymorphisms.
These grants also allowed the completion of cataloguing the works in SCOLAR's Human Genetics Historical Library, which was established in 2006. Since then, over 3,000 volumes have been catalogued, making it the largest such collection in Europe.
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Special Collections and Archives