Series 3: Laboratory Notes and Notebooks, 1937-1976

The Laboratory Notes and Notebooks series contains materials documenting experiments performed by Spiegelman, his students, and his professional colleagues from 1937 to 1976. There are three broad sub-series: Sugar and Enzyme Studies; Enzyme, DNA, and RNA Studies; DNA, RNA, and Cancer Studies. Researchers should be aware of the existence of overlaps in the types of studies documented in each sub-series. Included in the series are notes, graphs, negatives, shipping invoices, writings, research, and correspondence that were originally housed in three-ring binders. Notebooks identified as Spiegelman's date from 1937 to 1959 and include various assays related to enzyme synthesis and characteristics, as well as his early work with RNA-DNA. The bulk of the series consists of notes from the early-1960s to the mid-1970s covering Spiegelman's studies on the enzymes of RNA viruses, efforts to prove the possibility of the reverse transcription of RNA to DNA, and research into possible connections between human cancer and viruses. Of particular interest is the group of notebooks written by frequent collaborator Dr. Ichiro Haruna, dated from 1962 to 1966. These notebooks contain Spiegelman and Haruna's experiments in isolating and manipulating an RNA-replicating enzyme from the phage Qβ virus. Other colleagues, who worked as Spiegelman's investigators and whose experiments are documented include Roy H. Doi, Dr. Y. Ohtaka, Tamiko Kano-Sueoka, Lacy R. Overby, and Dr. Jeffrey Schlom.

The series is arranged chronologically by year and alphabetically by folder title within each year. Folder titles were amended where they did not accurately reflect the notebook's contents. Bulk dates were assigned to folder groups that documented ongoing experiments performed by the various investigators in an effort to collocate experiments from a single series together so their progression over the course of several years could be understood.