This collection consists of materials relating to Shull's work commissioned by the Carnegie Institution of Washington to collaborate with their grantee, Luther Burbank, with the aim of analyzing Burbank's data on plant breeding and hybridization and preparing it for publication in suitable scientific journals. Shull visited Burbank's plant-breeding farm in California eight times between 1906 and 1910. There are files for each plant genus involved in Burbank's work. These files contain notes, calculations, clippings from newspapers or periodicals, and an unpublished manuscript of Shull's final report to the Carnegie Institution. There is also a report by Edwin C. MacDowell, which gives background information about the collection.

The historian of science Robert C. Olby is a graduate of University College London and Oxford. Best known for his work on the history of genetics, especially the Bateson school, and for his study of the early history of molecular biology, Olby is currently a Research Professor in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of The Origins of Mendelism (1966), Charles Darwin (1967), The Path to the Double Helix (1974), and the Norton History of Biology. His current research is focused on the conceptual foundations of modern sensory neurophysiology and an intellectual biography of Francis Crick. The Olby Collection contains about 150 photocopies of correspondence and documents collected by Olby during research for The Path to the Double Helix. Among these is a copy of a manuscript by F. C. Crick and James D. Watson, "The Complementary Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid," prepared while Watson was at CalTech.

The correspondence in this collection concerns behavior genetics, evolution, heredity, etc. There is material relating to the congresses of the Permanent International Committee on Genetics, and the IXth (Bellagio, 1953), Xth (Montreal, 1958), and XIth (The Hague, 1963) International Congress of Genetics. There is also correspondence pertaining to the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology (1955), the Mendel Semi-Centennial Symposium (1950), the Soviet geneticists' visit to the U.S. in 1967, and to Anton R. Zhebrak.