Francis Crick War Diaries to Auction

Diaries written by English molecular biologist Francis Crick who played a crucial role in deciphering the helical structure of the DNA molecule will go under the hammer at Sworders on October 24.

The three volumes, covering the period 1938-39 are part of a cache of manuscripts that include letters from 12 Nobel Prize winning scientists offered as part of the Books and Maps auction.

This collection of autograph letters, pamphlets and manuscripts was given to the vendor’s father Leonard Walden by his friend and colleague Edward Neville da Costa Andrade. The two men had met during the First World War and worked together for nearly 40 years.

Walden, a platoon sergeant at Passchendaele in 1917 and the recipient of a George Medal and Bar for his work on mines and the detection of booby traps in 1941, worked as a laboratory technician in London for several important 20th century scientists. Andrade was an English physicist, writer, and poet. He was Quain Professor of Physics at University College, London, from 1928 to 1950 at the time Francis Crick (1916-2004) was studying for his PhD.

Crick’s doctorate concerned “measuring the viscosity of water at high temperature” with these three neatly written volumes recording his daily routine at the laboratory. He frequently refers to his lab technician (Walden) throughout the text. Two of the volumes have the inscription 'FH Compton Crick, U.C. London, Physics Research Lab'. Crick’s diaries are offered together with a 26-page report to the Department of Science & Industrial Research discussing the research on the viscosity of water. The typed document includes corrections by hand and a full-page sketch. The lot has an estimate of £800-£1,200. 

A copy of Francis Crick’s Nobel Lecture On the genetic code delivered December 11, 1962, published in Stockholm in 1963, is inscribed and signed "For Leonard Walden who knew me first before it all happened, Francis" is part of a lot with four autographed letters with an estimate of £500-£800.

The collection also includes letters by Danish theoretical physicist Niels Bohr, Australian-born British physicist Sir William Bragg, atmospheric physicist Edward  Appleton, neurophysiologist Sir Charles Sherrington, theoretical physicist John Strutt, Ernest Rutherford, Edward Appleton, Svante Arrthenius, Dr Philip Lenard, Max von Laue, Sir Nevill Mott, and Dorothy Hodgkin.