Some history of science

Following on from reference 1, I have continued to poke around, turning up reference 2, a mathematically flavoured treatment of the organisation of the random sequences arising from what is sometimes called 'whole genome shotgun sequences' into a coherent, linear order. Where all one has to go on is the overlaps between some of the sequences and where allowance is made for an error rate.

From there I am referred to reference 3, from some fifty years previously, and from there to reference 4, from more than thirty years before that.  A rather expensive copy of same is the subject of the snap above.

Reference 3 turned out to be surprisingly accessible and helpful, taking me through some of the work that was being done before the arrival of the double helix and sequencers - although, to be precise, the double helix arrived on the scene in 1954, five years before the arrival of the present paper. Notwithstanding, it remains the case that people were mapping chromosomes well before Watson & Crick wrote to Nature at reference 5.

For more basics, I was referred to reference 4, with the author, Thomas Morgan, being a biological eminence who lived from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century and who is to be found at reference 6.

There was a rather old-fashioned review of this book in Nature, not long after its publication, which suggested that this book had been written in haste - the product of an important series of lectures - the Mrs. Hepsa Ely Silliman Memorial Lectures - and was not up to the high standard of his previous books. I also got the impression that a lot of the 350 odd pages would be devoted to debates which had moved on in the hundred years that have followed publication. Nevertheless, I was intrigued enough to ask Bing about the book, which turned up the copy snapped above.

I abstained, and, more for fun than anything else, and opted for the copy from Texas for a little less than a tenner - and a little more than a tenner for postage and packing. We shall see what sort of condition this ex-library book - I think from the same edition as the expensive one - turns up in. Abebooks had lots of copies at prices in between, including a lot of glossy looking heritage versions, print-on-demand, from India, for around £30. Probably the sort of photographic reproduction of old print which I find irritating.

PS 1: reference 5 turns out to be a very short paper in Nature. I shall have to investigate in slow time why my subscription does not cover this paper and I had to resort to the power of Google to turn me up a copy from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

PS 2: while following reference 7, over breakfast today I turned up the piece in the Guardian at reference 8. A rather different view of the nationalisation of basic utilities. We are not reminded that if you sell off property which you want to continue to use, you have to pay rent to the new owner - rent which includes compensation for the risk that he has taken with his money. I associate to the current practise of companies selling off their real estate, only to rent it back again: I had always assumed that this is some kind of tax fiddle - but maybe it is as much about raising some short term readies at a time of need - or perhaps a spot of asset stripping.

PS 3: I now associate to the near accident with Abebooks reported at reference 9. Did I ever get back to Dr. Zhivago? Did we watch another version on television?

But I can report that the house Pasternak lived in for a while is still to be found in gmaps, war in Ukraine notwithstanding. In flat, well watered country a little to the west of the southern end of the Urals. North of Perm and Ekaterinburg, aka Yekaterinburg, aka Sverdlovsk. This last being a large and important city, the city where the Tsar and his family were executed in 1918 (to avoid risking their falling into the hands of the other side), the city once named for a once important Bolshevik, who fell out of favour in 1991, during the time of Yeltsin. Finding the house is left as an exercise for the reader.

Not altogether confident that I had got the right house, I panned about a bit in StreetView and then zoomed in, as far as I was able, to the sign out front. Where I could just about make out 'Pasternak', but what about the first word, not the same as that on the map proper, which was 'дом' or house?

I thought to give Google Images a go and he offered the above, adding value in making the first word top left 'Уралы' for Urals, which I might I worked out for myself on a better day. I was impressed. Also explaining why there was what looked like a tourist map below, just the sort of thing we might get on a visitor attraction in the country in this country.

Not quite Polesden Lacey for all that, despite Pasternak being a lot more worthy of note than Mrs. Greville. But I believe that his dacha near Moscow is a bit grander and a bit more touristy.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/09/a-genome.html.

Reference 2: The fragment assembly string graph - Eugene W. Myers – 2005. 

Reference 3: On the topology of the genetic fine structure – Seymour Benzer – 1959.

Reference 4: The Theory of the Gene – Morgan, T. H. – 1926. 

Reference 5: Molecular structure of nucleic acids; a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid - Watson JD, Crick FH - April 1953.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hunt_Morgan. 

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/09/trolleys-988-and-989.html. The postscript.

Reference 8: UK public has paid £200bn to shareholders of key industries since privatisation: Analysis reveals ‘privatisation premium’ of £250 per household per year paid to owners of water, rail, bus, energy and mail services since 2010 - Matthew Taylor, Sandra Laville, Guardian - 2025.

Reference 9: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/01/dr-z-part-4.html.