The archive of Robin Holliday (1932-2014)

This archive is not yet catalogued. The following is an interim description which may change before cataloguing is completed:

The archive consists primarily of titled files and folders on various topics. Most consist of a mix of correspondence, publications, drafts/corrections, administrative documentation, conference papers, texts of lectures etc. Some are grouped by subject ("DNA heteroduplex", "Insulin", "DNA Methylation" for example), others by correspondent ("MacPhee", "Loeb", "Hipkiss" etc.) and some by institution ("Oxford University Press", "Royal Society", "Genetics Division 1977-1981" etc.).

There are also a number of folders and notebooks of lab notes, which include tables, graphs, results etc.

Slides also feature heavily in the archive, some titled including topics such as "Understanding ageing", "Cell ageing", "Methylation", "Recombination misc" etc.

There is a digital component to the archive in the form of 15 floppy disks the titles of which include "Dr Synapse and the Park Stories: Factor 2, Mary's Problem, The Tree House", "Physics of the Origins of Molecular Biology", "History of Genetics I, History of Genetics II", "The Urgency of Research on Ageing" etc.

Additional digital material was transferred in May 2022 and is described below under 'Accruals'.

Robin Holliday was born in Jaffa, Palestine in 1932. At the age of two, his family moved to Richmond upon Thames, Surrey where they stayed for only a few years before moving to Ceylon in 1939. In 1941 they spent a year in Cape Town, South Africa, returned to Ceylon, then in 1944 moved to Gibraltar, instilling in the young Holliday a love for travel.

Holliday finished his schooling in postwar Stevenage, Hertfordshire, and won a scholarship to Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1952. He was an undergraduate when in 1953 Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the double-helix structure of DNA. Holliday heard a lecture about this discovery and its implications and then decided that he wanted to carry out research in genetics.

Holliday began PhD research in Cambridge and while there also campaigned to ban nuclear weapons testing. Post-PhD he worked at the John Innes Horticultural Institution and during a sabbatical to the University of Washington in 1963 he struck upon the idea of the "Holliday junction" (confirmed experimentally in 1976) - that is; the molecular structure through which genetic information crosses from one DNA helix to another during recombination.

In 1965 he began working at the National Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill, London where he formed and led the genetics division. It was here that he suggested, while continuing to work on recombination, that chemical modifications to the DNA helix, known as methylation, might have important effects on how the genome plays out its instructions, a theory which now underpins the field of epigenetics. While at the NIMR, Holliday was influenced by its then director Sir Peter Medawar, an immunologist with an interest in ageing, and began to look at the question of how cells might age, a strong interest which is heavily represented in his publications.

In 1988 he took a position with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Sydney, where he lived with his wife until his death in 2014.

Holliday was one of the first scientists to apply molecular science to the study of ageing. Several of his books on the topic are held in the Wellcome Library:

• Ageing: the paradox of life
• Understanding Ageing
• The science of human progress