As author of the 2009 book Francis Crick: Hunter of Life's Secrets, I congratulate Alexander Gann and Jan Witkowski for their detective work on the previously lost correspondence between Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins (Nature 467, 519–524; 2010). This material is invaluable for biographers and historians.

The rediscovered correspondence affirms my judgement — based on letters preserved with successive typescripts of Watson and Crick's 1953 papers, now at the Wellcome Library in London — that Crick was very much in charge of events during this period. It also reveals the continuing strength of Wilkins' friendship with Crick, which in 1959 found expression in his pleading with Crick not to abandon Cambridge in favour of the United States.