What happened on May 13, 1961? Two back-to-back papers on the isolation of mRNA were published in Nature. One was by Brenner, Jacob and Meselson entitled "An Unstable Intermediate Carrying Information from Genes to Ribosomes for Protein Synthesis" and the other by Gros, Hiatt, Gilbert, Kurland, Risebrough and Watson with the title "Unstable Ribonucleic Acid Revealed by Pulse Labelling of Escherichia Coli". No nobel prize was awarded for the discovery of mRNA and other researchers made crucial contributions to its discovery. For more information on the discovery of mRNA, read the Essay "Who discovered messenger RNA" by Matthew Cobb (University of Mancherster) which was published in 2015 in Current Biology (linked below).

Read the Nature paper by Brenner et al. (1961) and the corresponding manuscript draft on the Wellcome Collection Website.
Read the Nature paper by Gros et al. (1961)  and the corresponding manuscript draft on the Wellcome Collection Website.
Read the Current Biology Essay by Cobb (Open Archive Access)

Image Sources:
Left: Manuscript title page from Brenner, Jacob, Meselson (1961) An Unstable Intermediate Carrying Information from Genes to Ribosomes for Protein Synthesis, Nature.
Right: Manuscript titel page from Gros, Gilbert, Hiatt, Kurland, Risebrough, Watson (1961) Unstable Ribonucleic Acid Revealed by Pulse Labelling of Escherichia Coli, Nature
Both from the Wellcome Collection Website: Brenner et al. and Gros et al..
Both published under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.