One grey Friday afternoon, I opened a particularly full Crick box for the first time to find, pressed at the back, as if forgotten, a foreign magazine with the title Cik. With its girl-in-a-bikini cover, I didn't need any help with translation to understand the magazine's title and the sway of its contents. My first impression was that I had stumbled upon, shall we say, an accidental inclusion, a colourful stray. Published in 1973, the magazine was from Belgrade. Duty bound as an archivist, I gave it a second, more thorough examination.

I was rewarded with the surprising discovery of a DNA cartoon strip - generously spread across two pages in 20 frames - called Molekul Gospodar. According to Google, gospodar is Serbian for prince, lord or ruler. The cartoon strip is, then, the story of the ruling molecule. Here is the tale of a trinity of scientific superheroes fit for a modern age: a Krik, a Votson and a Vilkins. Perhaps not surprisingly, there is no Rosalindska Franklinska. The rich signification of Molekul Gospodar consists as much in what it excludes as in what it includes: a DNA cartoon strip that overlooks its scientific heroine, published in a magazine that celebrates its pin-ups - or should I say, to borrow the term of endearment favoured by Watson, its 'popsies'?

Although Watson and Crick's first paper for Nature did find publication in the old Soviet Union (and sold out immediately), and although it was at a conference in Moscow in 1961 that Crick heard Marshall Nirenberg first report experimental results that would lead to the cracking of the genetic code by 1966, Soviet biology was emerging from a long sleep of scientific denial. From 1935, under the brutal influence of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, ideology and political expedience insisted upon a Lamarckian view of inheritance, rejecting the tyranny of a ruling molecule as bourgeois. Not a single genetics textbook was published in the Soviet Union for nearly three decades. Not until 1965 was Lysenko removed as Director of the Soviet Institute of Genetics, signalling the return of Soviet biology to the mainstream scientific community.

Yugoslavia, situated between East and West, was not without its own internal conflicts, and its relations with the Soviet Union had always been difficult. President Tito had lent support to Dubcek's Czech programme of 'socialism with a human face' and denounced the 1968 Prague invasion. Only five years later, this issue of Cik with its brash breeze of modernity hit the Belgrade streets. Molekul Gospodar begins with the father of genetics, with Mendel and his garden peas. A logical place to start, but this potted cartoon history would have been a dangerous heresy during Lysenko's reign. Dangerous enough for a Gulag reward.

Links

The Crick papers : View items from the Francis Crick archives on the Trust's Human Genome website

Scientific papers of Francis Crick on the Wellcome Library pages: Project overview