25 March 1958

Dr. George B. Brown

Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research

410 East 68th Street

New York 21, New York

Dear Dr. Brown:

We thank you for the crystals of 9-methyladenine which you sent us. They arrived in good condition, and we were able to find one that could be used for X-ray photography without recrystallization. Those that were less satisfactory were dissolved in water and recrystallized, to give excellent crystals that are adequate for our purposes.

The 3-methylthymine that we have in mind is that described in Beilstein XXIV, page 355. If you have some of this substance to spare, we should indeed like to have it for our studies.

With many thanks for your helpful cooperation, I am

Sincerely yours,

Linus Pauling:k

cc: Dr. C. P. Rhoads

25 March 1958

Mr. Norman Cousins

The Saturday Review

25 West 45th Street

New York, New York

Dear Mr. Cousins:

I am writing in part to express to you my personal appreciation for the many fine actions that you have been taking about the great world's problem that must be solved. In particular, I wish to tell you how much I have liked some of the editorials that you have written in The Saturday Review.

The editorial in the 15 March issue, entitled "Dr. Teller and the Spirit of Adventure," seemed to me to be less effective than others that you have written, and also less effective than the book review by Dr. John M. Fowler in the 22 March issue. I shall mention only one point about your editorial. You say that "A report for the AEC made public very recently revealed that radioactive strontium in the bones of American adults has increased thirty percent as the result of nuclear tests. The radioactive strontium in the bones of children has increased fifty percent, according to the same report." I do not know just what you are saying here. Perhaps you mean during one or two years these increases took place. Of course, no American adults and no American children had any radioactive strontium in their bones a few decades ago, so that the increase as the result of nuclear tests.

Also, later on there occurs the sentence "At the end of twenty-eight years, the radioactive strontium in the air still retains half its strength." This would be a satisfactory statement if the words "in the air" were left out. With these words, it is hard to know what the statement is supposed to mean.

I think that your discussion of radium dials of wrist watches is not very good. One should not call this radiation "the infinitesimal amount." Also, I doubt that the statement is true that the peril of radioactive fallout is less than that represented by the radiation from the radium dial of a wrist watch. The reference to opening the face of the watch and eating the radium seems to me to be of no significance, and it serves only to confuse the issue.

I should like to see your efforts as effective as possible, and I believe that they could be made still more effective if you were to receive good advice about scientific questions. I should, of course, be pleased to have you call upon me at any time.

If you would like me to do so, I could give you other examples of statements in your editorial that seem to me to be more or less unsatisfactory. Perhaps I should give you one more example now. You say "Every particle of radioactive strontium taken into the body is stored by the body..." This statement is not true. Most of the radioactive strontium taken into the body is excreted again, and only a fraction, usually a small fraction, is stored in the body. If Dr. Teller were to reply to your editorial, he could quite properly attack it on the grounds that you make untrue and exaggerated statements about fallout

I note that you repeat this untrue statement near the end of the article, saying "Every little bit that enters the body is stored..."

Let me repeat my offer to you to assist in any way that I can. I have had a great deal of experience in the various scientific fields that relate to this question - the biological and medical as well as the physical and chemical. I have read and thought a great deal about these matters, and I know what the pitfalls are. In all of my writings and public statements I have taken great care to avoid exaggeration and to avoid the use of untrue or misleading statements. I know, however, how easy it is to make a statement that turns out not to be quite correct.

There is a question that I should like to ask you. On 13 January 1958 I sent to you a news release that I had prepared about the petition by myself and 9235 scientists to the United Nations. This petition is mentioned in the 15 March issue. I have not seen all of the issues of The Saturday Review this year, but I do not remember having seen any earlier mention of the petition. I should be pleased if you could send me tear sheets of earlier mention of the petition in The Saturday Review. I am especially interested in this petition because it was almost entirely the result of my own effort. The job of gathering the signatures was done very largely by me, with the help of a few volunteers, and a secretary whom I employed for the purpose, on a part-time basis. Almost the entire cost of gathering the signatures was borne by me, and, in fact, the total cost was not very great.

Sincerely yours,

Linus Pauling: LL

25 March 1958

Dear Peter:

I am happy to have your two letters, of 12 and 17 March.

It is fine that you have accepted the offer of a lectureship on Professor Ingold's staff, in chemistry, University College, London. I think that it is a good thing for you to have done. It will give you some teaching experience. I think too that you are right in saying that you will be in a strong position later on. Probably you could have got a teaching job in a college here without any trouble - Haverford College, for example, or Reed College. A number of such colleges have been looking for people. They probably would have required that you show up about 1 September, which may have caused you trouble.

I have been thinking over the matter of your flat, and I shall attach a postscript to this letter, if I think of something worthwhile to say.

I must check up on the conference. I have been in such a turmoil for the last couple of months that I don't know what has happened. I have accepted an invitation to come to London in September - 15 to 17, I think. I think that I received some other invitation, and I shall have Mrs. Wulf see if she can find it, and get me to answer it.

It will be fine to have the water structures published. Please tell me the reference about dipole-dipole and quadrupole-quadrupole interactions as being stronger than van der Waals effects.

I think that the situation in fact is that one must be careful in making such a statement, because what might be called dipole-dlpole and quadrupole-quadrupole interactions are in large part taken into considersation under the name hydrogen bond. One way of describing the dipole moment and quadrupole moment of the water molecule is by placing a small positive charge on each of the hydrogen atoms and a corresponding negative charge on the oxygen atoms. If this is done, one can calculate an electrostatic energy, which corresponds to the hydrogen-bond energy. It is best done by putting two negative charges at the other two tetrahedral positions around the oxygen nucleus, rather than the double negative charge at the oxygen nucleus. However, this is only a rough approximation to the hydrogen bond energy, because there is also a resonance effect with the long bond coming into some extent. Accordingly, if one discusses ice or water in terms of hydrogen bonds, one should not also discuss it in terms of dipole-dipole, etc. interactions.

It is easy enough to do the calculations (the summations converge very rapidly), but I do not think that it is worth while to do so. Perhaps, however, we should mention in our manuscript essentially what is pointed out above.

I am glad to hear that your tetrachloronickelate structure is moving along well.

I am getting a letter off to Dr. Green. We have one very good man here on the project now, in addition, of course, to Dick Marsh and other people. This is Dr. Burns, a Scot, vho has spent several years in Ghana.

I am also writing to Dr. Ian Bush, although I do not remember him. We have money permitting us to give stipends of as much as $5000 a year to men with M.D. degrees who want to work for a Ph.D. degree. We probably could pay even more.

I enclose my check for $148, to cover the books listed in your letter, which you have purchased for me. This covers the Penguins listed and also H. K. Lewis and Co. I am not sure that I have told you that I am writing a book. I have been having an argument with Teller - I tried to get LIFE to publish a reply, about 5000 words, to the article by Teller and Latter in the 10 February issue, and they refused. They were willing only to publish a short letter from me, which I submitted. However, I decided to reply anyway, by writing a book, to have the title No More War! I had just made this decision when I got a letter from Barbara Kamb, saying that Dodd, Mead and Company were interested in publishing a book by me, on this subject. Things moved along fast, and I now have written 3 of the 9 chapters, and I expect to write the ninth one tomorrow. It is scheduled to appear on 11 August. It takes about this long to get out a book. Also, I spoke in the biggest auditorium on the Berkeley campus, to about 1200 students and other auditors, on the U.C.L.A. campus, and also to good sized groups on the Santa Barbara and Riverside campuses of the University of California. Also, I have submitted a paper to the National Academy of Sciences - that is, I have sent in the abstract for a paper to be presented at the April meeting - on longevity and obesity, in which I point out that Teller made a mistake by a factor of 1440 in comparing the effect of being overweight with the fallout effect. I am looking forward to presenting this talk.

Much love from

[Linus Pauling]