Wyatt, Dr H. Vivian (b.1927)

The collection largely comprises background materials for and reactions to Dr H. V. Wyatt's article on the reception of Oswald Avery's 1944 DNA research, 'When does information become knowledge?', Nature 235 (1972): 86–89. Also included are Dr Wyatt's papers from the seminal 1964 microbial genetics course run by William Hayes of the Medical Research Council Microbial Genetics Research Unit, plus a small file notes on the design of biological laboratories.

1928-2000

1 box

The papers were given to the library at Wellcome Collection by Dr H. V. Wyatt in March 2010 and January 2011.

Dr H. Vivian Wyatt has been Visiting Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Leeds since 2004. He was formerly ICI Fellow at the University of Leeds and a Reader at Bradford University. He has held posts at St Bartholomew's Hospital, Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Colleges of Medical Sciences, West Bank. In addition, he has held honorary posts at Manchester and Leeds Universities, Bradford College of Art, Gono University, Bangladesh (Visiting Professor), Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, Calcutta, and the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda.

In 2002 he was made a WHO Expert on safe injections, and he has been a consultant for polio compensation in the USA, with five successful cases, including a test case. Wyatt's interest in polio was sparked by reading the old literature and realizing that new ideas on cellular immunology would explain many difficulties.

Wyatt developed a love of history and books while working for as a librarian in the army in the 1940s, an interest which led to his 1972 Nature paper on Oswald Avery around which the documents in this archive collection centre.

His current research interests include the genetic susceptibility to polio and motor neurone disease, poliomyelitis and injections in the developing world, and the history of Brucellosis.

For Wyatt's full Curriculum Vitae see his personal website..

At Wellcome Collection:

The scientific papers of Dr Francis Crick (collection reference PP/CRI).

The papers of Dr Gerard R Wyatt (collection reference PP/GRW), which include laboratory notebooks containing details of experiments on the structure and composition of nucleic acids and their constituent bases. Wyatt's experimental work is cited in footnote 4 to the first Watson and Crick paper, "Molecular structure of nucleic acids: a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid," Nature, 171 (1953), 737-8. Crick subsequently remarked, in interview: "The data of Chargaff's, you know, wasn't all that convincing unless you wanted to believe it [...] until Wyatt came along and boosted it up" (Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation, 1979, p. 179).

On the National Library of Medicine's 'Profiles in Science website:

Digital versions of the papers of Joshua Lederberg, including material on Oswald Avery, at http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/retrieve/Collection/CID/BB