42nd Cold Spring Harbor Symposium: 'Chromatin'

Correspondence and notes regarding the 42nd Cold Spring Harbor Symposium, entitled 'Chromatin', held at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York, 1-8 June, 1977.

Despite not wishing "to present a formal paper" (Crick to the Meetings Co-ordinator, 22 February, 1977), the file includes:

10 sheets of notes (holograph), commencing: "Hadn't expected to talk";

8 sheets of notes (holograph) headed "Opening Comments" and also beginning with the note "Hadn't expected to talk";

and a notepad (11" x 81/2") filled entirely with notes (holograph) made during the course of the meeting (first dated entry is 2 June and the last entry is 5 June).

A note in the file indicates that Crick also gave a talk ("How Scientists Work") at Cold Spring Harbor on 12 June, 1977.

The correspondence largely comprises letters between Crick and James Watson. On the question of who to invite to the Symposium on Chromatin, see, for instance, Crick to Watson (29 October, 1976): "And now for something completely new. In the last three weeks I have become extremely interested in an obscure Dane called Bak ... He now thinks, as I do, that what he is seeing is a hollow tube and his unpublished data make me believe it to be a super-solenoid .... It may be that the complete hierarchy of helices has now been uncovered, at least for human chromosomes."