Historic Papers from Nature
Nature has published online some of the most prominent scientific breakthroughs that they’ve published in the last century, and the subjects span archaeology and biology to physics and astronomy. They’ve released for free commentaries that explain the significance of the accompanying papers.
I particularly enjoyed Ginés Morata’s commentary “The blueprint of animals revealed” (PDF), which explains Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard’s and Eric Wieschaus’ extraordinary paper in fruit fly genetics, for which they, along with Ed Lewis, received the Nobel Prize in 1995.
Also making an appearance is Sydney Brenner’s commentary on Watson and Crick’s double helix paper (PDF), which gives a short history of the context for the discovery, and how much it was overlooked at the time.
These days, the papers just make up little boxes and such in textbooks, and it’s hard to really appreciate the time and effort that went into these discoveries. Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus, for example, screened thousands upon thousands of matings to get their short list of genes! Flies ain’t bacteria, and screening mutations in flies – especially embryonic lethal mutations that have to be maintained heterozygously in diploid – is a lot harder than looking at a plate of colonies, that’s for sure!
