Eckersley Lecture 60th Anniversary – Dr Gary M. Carré-Skinner, Old Bedalian ‘A Most Important Discovery’ – The Story of DNA

On 19 March 1953 Francis Crick, working in Sir Lawrence Bragg’s Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, sat down and wrote a seven-page letter to his 12 yr old son Michael who was a student at Bedales. In it he described what he called ‘a most important discovery’: the double-helix structure of DNA, more than a month before it was published in the scientific literature. The letter, thought to be the first written record of the structure of DNA anywhere in the world, sold at Christie’s in 2013 for £3.45 million. It is fitting then, that the inaugural Eckersley Lecture in 1966 was delivered by Sir Lawrence Bragg himself, the nobel laureate who ran the laboratory where the discovery was made, and whose own technique, X-Ray Crystallography, was the essential tool that made it possible.

This lecture takes up that story sixty years on. Dr Gary M. Carré-Skinner will trace the arc from Mendel’s peas and Darwin’s missing mechanism, through the race to crack the double helix, to the Central Dogma of molecular biology and the practical tools – PCR, DNA sequencing and the Human Genome Project that followed. He will draw on his own career at Illumina and his current work as co-inventor of mcPCR, a new technology that copies DNA methylation patterns for the first time, with applications in early cancer detection.

Bedales has its own unique connection with the story of DNA. This lecture asks: where does it lead next?
We are delighted to welcome Dr Gary M. Carré-Skinner for the 60th Anniversary of the Eckersley Lecture.