Corvo, Crick and Uncle Syd

On May 18th, 2010, Sydney Brenner gave a speech at the opening of the library extension newly built to house the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) archives. He had recently donated his own papers to the collection, and the speech described how that gift had come about. Soon after an encounter in the public toilet at a meeting of the Helmholtz Club, where he eluded the advances of a macintoshed agent purporting to represent an acquisitive Californian bookdealer keen to purchase his papers, Sydney learned that Jim was building ‘a pyramid’ at CSHL to house the Watson papers and, he calculated, if he wanted his own papers to survive and be known to history, he should get them in there too. This, at any rate, was the gist of the thing