After receiving his PhB at Yale's Sheffield Scientific School in 1858, Alfred P. Rockwell continued his studies at the Museum of Practical Geology in London and the Bergakademie Freiberg, focused largely on mining engineering and coal geology. After service in the Civil War, he held positions at Yale and MIT before leaving academia in 1873 to pursue other opportunities. He later served as president of the Eastern Rail Road and Treasurer of the Great Falls Manufacturing Company, a textile firm in New Hampshire. The small collection of the papers of Alfred P. Rockwell document his interest in coal geology during the period of his postgraduate study at the Museum of Practical Geology and the Bergakademie, 1858-1859. Although the correspondence is slight, the collection includes a suite of notes on collieries, coal mining technology, and the economics of coal. Of particular note in the collection are the eight notebooks on mining engineering (some containing sketches), including two volumes of notes on John Percy's lectures at the Museum of Practical Geology, 1858, three volumes kept during his stay at the Bergakademie Freiberg, including one on a course on metallurgy taught by Bernhard von Cotta, 1858-1859, and one of an industrial tour through Germany and Belgium (June 1859). The other volumes include two on collieries in northern England, and one including of production records for the Great Falls Manufacturing Company, 1879-1886.

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.

Britton Chance (1913-2010) was a biochemist and biophysicist as well as a pioneer in the field of biomedical optics. Chance received his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania in 1940 and his Ph.D. in Biology and Physiology from Cambridge University in 1942. Over the course of his nearly eight decade career, Chance was dedicated to the application and transfer of basic scientific research and technology to clinical medicine. The Britton Chance Papers contain correspondence, research notes, experimental data, publication materials, and photographs stemming from Chance's life as a biochemist, biophysicist, and yachtsman. The collection is broken up into fifteen series that document every aspect of his scientific work.

Correspondence and papers centering on McCulloch's study of the functional organization of the central nervous system and cybernetics. McCulloch (1898-1969) was a major figure in establishing the theoretical ground for modern computers and in "biological computer" studies during the 1960s. Other topics include the brain or neural studies, biological psychiatry, chemical warfare, space biology, and U.S. Army studies. His participation in the American Society of Cybernetics and the Josiah Macy Conferences is well documented, and there are numerous papers and notes on other conferences attended.

One of the most influential statisticians of the twentieth century, John Wilder Tukey (1915-2000) played a key role in both the development and study of statistics. Upon receiving his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1939 from Brown University, he joined the faculty at Princeton; in 1945, he also began work at Bell Laboratories. Equally committed to both Princeton and Bell Labs, Tukey chose to work concurrently at both institutions. He was also a consultant for many companies, such as Merck and Company, Xerox Corporation, and the Educational Testing Service, and was a frequent advisor to the government for such programs as the US Census. From 1960 to 1980 he led the statistical component of NBC's election night projections. Among other projects Tukey analyzed Alfred Kinsey's research and examined data on ozone depletion. Tukey made many important contributions to the field of statistics, such as work in time series analysis, exploratory data analysis, and multiple comparisons. Through his work, Tukey developed statistical applications including the Box-and-Whisker Plot, the Stem-and-Leaf Diagram, Cooley-Tukey Fast Fourier Transforms, Tukey's Paired Comparisons and citation and permutated indices. Tukey's influence extends beyond statistics to everyday language: he was the first to use the word "software" in print and coined words such as "bit" and "linear programming." A prolific writer, John W. Tukey penned more than 500 technical papers and reports and published, among numerous other works. His collected papers amount to eight volumes of work. The Tukey Papers provides a comprehensive perspective into Tukey's professional activities from his days as a graduate student until his death in 2000. Among the material is his correspondence and his published and unpublished works. There is abundant material from Tukey's long careers at Bell Laboratories and Princeton University, including extensive lecture notes and syllabi. Also included are copious materials relating to his professional activities with such agencies as the National Research Council, the Army Records Office, Xerox PARC, Merck and Company, the President's Science Advisory Committee, and the National Academy of Sciences.

A bacteriologist from MIT, Salvador E. Luria's work with Max Delbruck on bacteriophage demonstrated that bacterial resistance to certain phages arose through genetic mutations. His later work showed that phages also mutate genetically. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969 with Max Delbruck and Alfred D. Hershey. The collection is organized into seven series: I. Correspondence, 1938-1992 ; IIa. Subject Files, 1938-1990 ; IIb. Personal Material. 1923-1991 ; III. Works by Luria, 1938-1987 ; IV. Works by Others, 1944-1990 ; V. Research Notes and Notebooks, 1941-1979 ; VI. Course Material, 1931-1991 ; VII. Photographs and Negatives, 1957-1982. Arrangement: Alphabetical by folder title and then chronological within each folder.