Oliver Smithies:

[00:00:00] On page 19, year 1963, it’s not much better book, that’s pretty clear, because at a quick glance, the book stops on page 48, and is blank thereafter.  So anyway, in starts on Wednesday, January 9th, 1963, some talking about pellets and mitochondria and so on, and nuclei, very pretty.  And gel on each sample.  But no images.  Sketches on page 4, allowing for liver size, these are perfectly, or probably equivalent amount of nuclei, et cetera.  Running gels, and with or without calcium, with or without potassium.  Homogenization tests, [00:01:00] a sketch or two of what the tubes look like.  Batch treatment, sucrose solutions, preparations, different medium, columns made slightly differently.

The whole set of pellets are drawn on page 22, Friday, January 17th.  This pellet is rather dirty in appearance, fairly clean pellet.  And neither pellet very clean, and a clean pellet with the different pHs.

Continuing on the following page 24, rather dirty pellets, and moderately clean bottom, et cetera.  So evidently still trying to get clean nuclei, plus or minus thiol, and spermidine on page 29. [00:02:00]

Repeats of pH tests with 0.04M phosphate on page 33.  Comment on page 32, “Good cleanliness, especially on the bottom.  Extremely good cleanliness in bowl,” so as if I was rather pleased with the phosphate tests.

More sketches of pellets on January 23rd, page 37, 38, 39, similar.  Thiols on SS tests, 41, 43, further tests with mercaptoethanol, [00:03:00] page 45, January 25th.

I evidently moved to a new lab on Tuesday, February 12th, because, “(In new lab) cold room with centrifuge solutions, compare Mike Sung repeated and got same result again.”  This must mean “Mike Sung,” this is perhaps before his paper; I think I had better check the timing, I thought that Mike Sung was after that time, but it may be in the time when Mike Sung still hadn’t published, because that’s the end of this book on page 47, and I’ll check the time when his paper, or his thesis was written.  So this is Book M, 1963, ends on page 47, February 12th.

This comment should go [00:04:00] where the experiments with histones are beginning to be discussed, because they were — many of them were done in helping Michael Sung with his thesis work.  Mike was one of my early graduate students, and we together were interested in histones.  I think I had a hypothesis at that time that histones differences might be a second form of colding on DNA, not just the DNA itself, but variations on the arrangement of the histones.  I need to check on that. [00:05:00]

Did we just finish this book?  We did.  So the end of Book M, on page 47.  This is referring to Mike.  The person is Mike Sung, and he did work for his thesis on preparing nuclei and eluting histones in his thesis.  I’ll just try to find out if the original paper ever gives any motivation for this sort of work from his thesis.  There isn’t really very clear statement in the thesis.  The introduction says, “A method has been developed [00:06:00] for characterizing sub-microgram levels, the heterogeneity of histones from purified nuclei,” but it doesn’t really say why we were doing the work.