22 May 1968

Dear Daddy,

I have been asked by the Council and several ordinary members of the Chemical and Physical Society of University College London, the oldest undergraduate society in the College and probably the oldest undergraduate science society in the world, to ask if you might be in England the first or second week of February 1969 in order to be the Distinguished Visitor of the Society and give a lecture on a Tuesday afternoon, be the guest of the Society at the annual dinner and dance and make a short comment after dinner?

I am the president of the Society, in the company of Donnan, Ramsay, Ingold, W.H. Bragg and Sir Jack Drummond. I should be very pleased and gratified to have you come and to bring Mamma. Unfortunately the Society is not in a position to pay your way so some other method must be found. We should all be very pleased to see you and I ask you please to consider the matter and see if you can come.

Thank you for your letter with the advice about papers, in particular speculative papers. I think at the moment we shall delay a bit and get a little more information. Actually, I think we shall shortly be in a position to publish rules for the structures of muscarinic compounds and I think we shall wait for that.

Thank you for the copy of the Double Helix. I saw Jim and his new wife last week. She is 20 and I think very nice and sensible. Very pretty too. He is busy trying to get Cold Spring Harbour off the ground.

My machine has measured 20000 diffraction maxima of five compounds in ten weeks. That is all right except it represents four miles of punched paper tape and I am having trouble getting a computer to read the tape.

Please consider coming in February. Are you coming to Europe any time?

Much love,

Peter