Resources related to the Nautilus article The Thrill of Defeat: What Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner taught me about being scooped
Creative nonfiction writers generally need to present to their editors this kind of evidence for what they're writing. For transparency and specifically so that anyone interested can know what evidence sparked specific statements I made in the article, here's a list of sources. The detective work involved in finding key nuggets of info like these is one of the hardest and yet most fun tasks involved in this kind of writing.

• The Nautilus article updated after Brenner's death (2019)
  
• The original Nautilus article (2015)
  
• Sydney Brenner's letters and lab notebooks from The Wellcome Library and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives
  
• Fred Sanger's insulin protein sequences by 1953
• Bovine insulin's nucleotide sequence
• Documentation of George Gamow's first code from Library of Congress
• Gamow's first code: documents from Oregon State
• Brenner's evidence against fully overlapping triplet codes, an RNA Tie Club note at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives
• Gamow and cryptography, from Lily Kay's book Who Wrote the Book of Life?
• Francis Crick's commaless code from the National Library of Medicine
• Crick's friend who found that the commaless code gave 20 possible codons, from What Mad Pursuit
• Photo of Crick and Brenner's blackboard from the MRC LMB Archive
• Brenner's theory that proflavin inserts or deletes a nucleotide in DNA
• Combining + and - mutants: the triplet code paper
• Crick consumed by experiments, walking home through Cambridge, from What Mad Pursuit
• Crick's meeting booklet from the 1961 Moscow conference, from The Wellcome Library
• Matt Meselson gives Crick the news, from What Mad Pursuit
• Marshall Nirenberg's account of the 1961 Moscow meeting
• Nirenberg's talk title and schedule in Crick's 1961 Moscow meeting booklet
• "Crick had not heard of Nirenberg or Matthaei" from Horace Judson's book The Eighth Day of Creation
• Nirenberg's notes for his 1961 Moscow talk from the National Library of Medicine
• Nirenberg's name inserted in the schedule in Crick's 1961 Moscow meeting booklet
• Crick writes that the audience of the Symposium in Moscow was "electrified", changing the word later to "startled"
• Crick's 4 Jan 1962 letter to Nirenberg, "It must be maddening to have the whole world jumping into one's problem. I must confess that we are doing a little on it ourselves..." from National Library of Medicine
• Crick's 29 Jan 1962 letter to Nirenberg with further results, from National Library of Medicine
• Transcript of Crick's BBC radio address recorded 16 Jan 1962 crediting the real breakthrough to Nirenberg and Matthaei, from the National Library of Medicine
• Audio file of Sept 2014 interview with Sydney Brenner (donated to CSHL Archives - they will be the source for this once they've catalogued it)
• Transcript of my interview with Sydney Brenner