The Secret Museum Read online

  The ancient Haida lived in houses made of cedar which slept 30 or more people. They ate mussels, oysters, oolichans (a fish) and oolichan grease (fish oil). High-ranking men and women tattooed their clan crests (depicting animals, the supernatural or clan histories) on to their skin. All the Haida had a deep respect for the environment. They travelled in cedarwood canoes. If you look on the back of a Canadian $20 note, you will see an artwork called Spirit of Haida Gwaii, by Haida artist Bill Reid, which depicts a Haida chief in a canoe with many other creatures of Haida Gwaii, including the raven, the frog, the eagle and the bear.

  The Haida language has no relationship to other languages – rather like Basque and the Ainu language once spoken on the island of Hokkaido in northern Japan. There are fewer than 40 remaining speakers of the language, most of them over 70 years old.

  I’d like to imagine the Haida rattle finding its way back to Haida Gwaii so its people can remember the days of the sGaagas. When it is returned, I am sure the Haida will say ‘Háw’aa’ –‘thank you’.

  [Louis Pasteur (1822–95)]

  Pasteur was a French chemist and biologist who invented pasteurization. Some of the things he used in his research are in storage in Blythe House.

  [A Haida shaman’s rattle]

  Of all the countless medical curiosities I saw in the Wellcome storage in Blythe House, I liked this rattle made out of cane and puffin beaks the most.

  [Haida Gwaii]

  The Haida are the indigenous people of Haida Gwaii (Islands of the People), an archipelago off the coast of Canada.

  [Totem poles]

  The Haida are known for their totem poles, which they call monumental poles. They carve them from red cedarwood trees, and each one takes a year to make.

  I saw the pencil sketch of DNA in the Wellcome Library, on Euston Road, London. The drawing belongs to the Francis Crick archive, which is made up of 2,000 paper files (or 200,000 sides of text/images) amassed by Crick during his career.

  There I met Ross MacFarlane, research officer at the Wellcome Library, and he showed me a selection of its treasures.

  We began with the oldest thing there, the Johnson Papyrus, a piece of a book, or scroll, from the fifth century AD. It was found in Egypt. It is the oldest surviving illustration of a herbal. What’s a herbal? It is a book with names or drawings of plants, usually with information about the plant as well – including its culinary, aromatic, medicinal or hallucinatory powers, and sometimes legends associated with it. In this case, the ancient, precious drawing is of a bluey-green comfrey plant. Below it, in Greek, is an explanation of how the plant can be used for healing. This is how herbalism developed: by trying out plants and seeing how they made you feel. By trial and error the properties and medicinal uses of different plants were discovered and passed on to others.

  We also looked through a diary belonging to Robert McCormick, ship’s surgeon and natural history expert on HMS Beagle. There is no mention of Darwin in the entire diary. Ross suggested McCormick was probably rather cross that Darwin had turned out to be such a natural history know-it-all, as that wasn’t the reason for him being brought on board the Beagle. Darwin joined the expedition late in the day when Fitzroy, the captain, decided he needed someone who knew about geology to come and keep him company, someone, most importantly, who would pay his own way. Darwin fitted the bill. Although I know he wasn’t a real geology pro because I visited the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences in Cambridge – who own Darwin’s rock collection from the Beagle – and they showed me a diary of Sedgwick’s, in which he mentions taking Darwin on a quick expedition to give him a crash course in geology just before he set sail.

  I also looked through an early guide to swimming written by a Cambridge don in Elizabethan England, and a letter written by the antiquarian Sir Hans Sloane, who collected the countless treasures that became the basis for the British Museum collection. In the letter, he talks about a door that leads from his garden into a coffee shop designed as a cabinet of rarities, where he went to chat over coffee with other local pals who were interested in new ideas and discoveries. I wondered whether he would mention chocolate, for he introduced drinking chocolate to Britain in 1687. He didn’t. But you’ve probably tasted something similar to his blend; ‘Sloane’s Milk Chocolate’ recipe eventually passed into the hands of Cadbury’s.

  Then I came to a white file filled with photographs, scientific papers, personal letters and musings. Ross pulled out the sketch. I instantly recognized the spiralling ladder that carries the Earth’s variety of life forms. The image was sketched in 1953, 84 years after Johann Friedrich Miescher discovered DNA in 1869.

  Miescher found out about DNA – which he called nuclein – when, doing a grim-sounding experiment on cell-digesting, he extracted some enzymes from a pig he had bought at a butcher’s and some cells from bandages used by a soldier during the Prussian War, which was going on at the time. He suggested that nuclein might be involved in heredity, but then discounted his own idea, saying it wasn’t possible that one single molecule could account for all the variation seen within species. He thought that would be far too simple.

  So Francis Crick and James Watson, helped by the work of Rosalind Franklin, didn’t discover DNA, but they did work out what it looked like. They struggled to conceptualize the exact shape of the molecule for years, and were helped enormously by Rosalind Franklin’s skill as an x-ray crystallographer.

  Franklin had spent four years researching crystals in Paris before moving back to London to work on investigating the structure of DNA. She was given jam jars full of gooey DNA and began to take x-ray photographs of it.

  Meanwhile in Cambridge, Crick and Watson made a homemade metal model of DNA as a way to represent, in reality, the ideas they were carrying around in their heads. They had several false starts. They made a triple helix in 1951 and invited Franklin to see it, and she pointed out the molecule as they had made it would never hold together. In 1953, after seeing a photograph taken by Franklin, their ideas fell into place. Finally, they got the model right, and made their physical double helix. This sketch was made around the same time: it was part of the process of grappling with exactly what the DNA molecule looks like. When finally the image became crystal clear in their minds, the scientists were ecstatic. Crick said, ‘It is not easy to convey, unless one has experienced it, the dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clinches into place.’

  Crick and Watson published their realization in the 25 April 1953 edition of Nature. The order of the names on the paper (Watson and Crick) was decided by the flip of a coin. The pair went on to win the Nobel Prize for their discovery, along with Dr Maurice Wilkins; Franklin, who had been pivotal to the research, died before the prize was awarded. Hopefully she would also have been honoured with the prize, had she been alive to receive it, for it would not have happened in the same way without her.

  Now we know that a DNA molecule looks like the image in the sketch: a double helix. Every living creature on earth is made up of right-handed spiral shapes like this. The sketch, according to experts at the Wellcome Collection shows a few key features of the molecule. It is right-handed, it has two strands running in opposite directions, and the building blocks of the strands (nucleotides) have one part that forms the backbone of the molecule and another (the base) that sticks out into the middle of the helix to join with a base on the opposite strand. This joining of two bases is essential in order for DNA to pass on genetic information from one generation to the next. That’s quite a lot of information, crucial to our existence on Earth, in one pencil sketch, don’t you think?

  There are at least 50 million cells in your body, and each one contains nearly 2 metres of DNA. Extracting your own is quite easy. If you’re the kind of geek who wants to try, follow these steps:

  1. Swish salt-water around your cheeks.

  2. Spit it into a glass containing water and washing-up liquid.

  3. Mix for a minute or so.


  4. Pour some ice-cold vodka, slowly, into the glass.

  5. In a couple of minutes, you will see some white strands form. These are strands of DNA. If you were able to look closely at them, you’d see the double helix shape sketched in Crick’s drawing.

  After co-winning the Nobel Prize, Crick became a household name. He was invited to all sorts of events, but he preferred to concentrate on his work, and keep to himself. In the archive is a ready-made, multi-purpose reply card from the 1960s, which reads:

  Dr Crick thanks you for your letter but regrets that he is unable to accept your kind invitation to

  –send an autograph

  –help you in your project

  –provide a photograph or read your manuscript

  –cure your disease

  –deliver a lecture

  –talk on the radio or act as chairman

  –appear on TV or become an editor

  Delete where appropriate.

  Later in life, Crick moved from Cambridge to San Diego, and worked at the Salk Institute there. He lived in a house called the Golden Helix. There he began focusing on neurobiology. He wanted to look inside the human brain, to study the networks, connections and firing patterns of neurons, as he thought they held the key to understanding mental activity and consciousness.

  The Wellcome Library bought Crick’s papers in 2001, while he was still alive. They consist of his research papers, letters from people who were ill, a lovely letter from a young boy saying he’d enjoyed meeting Crick and letters from colleagues. They all give you a sense that Crick, like all scientists, was – of course – a real person. It makes science seem less removed from normal life.

  Crick was keen for his work to become a part of this vast medical library, which anyone can access free of charge. On the day I visited, the library was packed with medical students cramming for exams. Perhaps one day, one of those students will make a breakthrough in healing and add their work to the collection, alongside the discoveries of herbalists in the fifth century and scientists like Crick.

  [Crick’s doodle of a DNA molecule]

  As we leafed through Crick’s papers I instantly recognized the spiralling ladder that carries the Earth’s variety of life forms.

  [Watson and Crick with their model of DNA]

  They made a model as a way to represent, in reality, the ideas they were carrying around in their heads.

  [Crick wins a Nobel Prize]

  Telegram to Crick announcing his Nobel Prize, 1962. He won the prize jointly with Watson and Dr Maurice Wilkins for their work on the molecular structure of DNA and ‘its significance for information transfer in living material’.

  AS WE WALKED ACROSS THE great hall, we started chatting. Finkel is very friendly, kind, interesting and seriously clever. He is one of only a hundred or so people in the world who can read cuneiform, the oldest form of writing in the world.

  He was first shown the basics of how to read the script, when he started at university and he knew ‘within about 20 minutes this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my existence’. He learned cuneiform, and later applied to work with it at the British Museum. He got the job. ‘In that moment, I achieved my life’s ambition.’

  Since that day in 1979, he has been working on the world’s largest, most cosmic jigsaw puzzle, piecing together pieces of cuneiform writing. His domain has been the Arched Room, a three-tiered room where all 120,000 of the British Museum’s behind the scenes cuneiform tablets are stored.

  On the top two levels are books about cuneiform and the cultures that employed this form of writing. On the ground level is a long run of tables for cuneiform scholars to write at. The walls are lined with bookshelves that once stored the British Library’s Mills and Boon collection. Now they are filled with trays, each one containing glass-topped boxes. Inside the boxes are clay tablets covered with ancient cuneiform writing. It looks like an alien script.

  Cuneiform script is made up of short, straight lines which go in different directions. The lines (called wedges) were imprinted in pieces of soft clay with a cut reed, used like a pen; ‘It looked a bit like a chopstick,’ explained Finkel. Cuneiform means ‘wedge shaped’, from the Latin cuneus, or wedge. The word doesn’t rhyme with uniform: you pronounce it ‘cu-neigh-i-form’.

  A lot of the clay tablets in Finkel’s domain come from the Royal Library of King Ashurbanipal, who lived in the sixth century BC. ‘He was king of the world at the time,’ Finkel told me, ‘a proper Arabian Nights king – harems, exotic foods, hundreds of servants, chariots.’ But he was also literate, and he loved clay books. He built his capital in a city called Nineveh (today called Kuyunjik, in Iraq) and, at the heart of his palace, in the citadel, he created his library.

  The library contained spells, myths about gods and heroes, stories of wrestling with bulls, recipes, astrology, medicine, histories, books on fortune telling, poems, love letters – and multiple copies of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Until I visited Finkel’s realm, I hadn’t been aware that the story had come down through the generations to us written on pieces of baked clay.

  The library also housed maps, plans, dictionaries, books of grammar and mundane tax forms, everyday ‘to do’ lists and legal records. There were a few ‘weirdo’ things, also, Finkel told me. ‘Like what?’ I asked. ‘Well, you know, strange dramas: there is one about a relationship between a god and his mother-in-law that was probably performed as a play in Babylon.’

  The king ordered every temple in Babylonia, in the south, to give him a copy of every piece of literature they owned. In some cases, pieces of writing had to be commandeered for the royal library.

  Every piece of clay writing in the library is written in exactly the same style of cuneiform. The king employed a roomful of scribes to read every single thing that went into the library and copy it out into perfect Assyrian cuneiform writing, ‘like BBC English,’ Finkel suggests. Important things were baked to terracotta, so that they would survive for a long time, and less important things were simply laid out in the sun to dry.

  The cuneiform on one particular clay tablet looks completely different to the rest. It has really big, childish writing on it and looks totally out of place. Finkel picked it up and began reading, tracing his finger across the clay tablet in his hands.

  Turn your faces to the petition manifest in my raised hands.

  May your fierce hearts rest,

  May your reins be appeased, grant me reconciliation

  That I may sing your praises without forgetting to the widespread people.

  It’s an incantation, written in a child’s hand, with letters a centimetre high which aren’t joined up. It was written by King Ashurbanipal when he was a child and learning to write. This is his school exercise book. Just as you might still have a school exercise book or two at home, to remind you of when you were learning to write, the king must have decided to keep this clay tablet as a souvenir of his childhood, a marker of the days when his love of literature was formed.

  The tablet begins, ‘Ea, Shamash, and Marduk, what are my iniquities?’ and continues with an incantation to the gods to forgive the writer and release him from sickness. The prayer is written to appease the wrath of a god who has stricken him down with illness.

  In the young king’s case, at the time, he was more than likely copying the incantation out as an exercise.

  ‘How old do you think he was when he wrote this?’ I asked Finkel.

  ‘About 12?’ he replied. ‘We don’t know for sure.’ There is only one tablet in the world of which scholars feel sure about the age of the scribe. That is because the scribe bit his tablet. Thousands of years later, the American curator who looked after it saw the teeth marks, slipped the tablet in his pocket and took it to his dentist. The dentist said that the marks were made by the teeth of a seven-year-old boy who lived over two millennia ago.

  The boy who copied out the incantation grew up, became king, ruled for 39 years and, over that time, built up an epic library. Two and a hal
f thousand years ago, the clay tablets were stored upright on shelves, like we store books – except for a few things, such as love letters, which were kept in baskets.

  The fact that the library has survived is something of a miracle. Towards the end of King Ashurbanipal’s reign, the city of Nineveh was ransacked and destroyed by the Medes and the Babylonians. They set the king’s precious library on fire. A whole upper floor came crashing down to the ground, and the tablets were smashed into pieces; the city was left in ruins. Bizarrely, this devastation saved the library from destruction. The fire baked the library’s clay tablets into terracotta, which survived for thousands of years inside the earth.

  In the mid-nineteenth century, the world’s first archaeologists started digging around what was once Nineveh and found these pieces of baked, smashed-up clay with strange writing upon them. Some pieces that had been caught in the fire were black; others, which the fire had missed, were damp after millennia inside the earth. Fortunately some of these were still intact. All the archaeologists had to do was lay them out in the sun to dry, just as the scribes had done when they were creating the library back in the sixth century BC.