May 1, 1968

Mr. James H. McKerrow

Box 488

Haverford College

Haverford, Pa.

Dear Mr. McKerrow:

I am pleased to have learned from your letter of 21 April that you have accepted appointment under an NIH grant and are to come to La Jolla soon to begin your graduate work.

I have talked with Dr. Arthur Robinson, who is my collaborator in the work on the molecular basis of mental disease, about your desire to work in this field.

The Biology Department in this University has the policy that during their first year graduate students in biology should rotate among different research groups spending six weeks with each of several groups during the period beginning 1 October. It is accordingly possible for you to work with us from 1 July 1968, when you arrive here, until 1 October or perhaps 15 November 1968.

Dr. Robinson and I look forward to seeing you on your arrival. You should get in touch with Dr. Robinson, when you get here. There is a good chance that I shall be away at that time, but in any case I shall look forward to seeing you a little later on. You can talk with Dr. Robinson about the work to be done, after your arrival here.

I enclose a reprint of a paper on anesthesia of brine shrimp. We are not carrying on work of this sort at the present time, however.

Sincerely,

Linus Pauling

2 May 1968

Dear Petie,

Diane did move a week or so ago. I didn’t mean to overemphasize the situation but you know that there are few people one can have around for a long time without invitations.

We were glad to have your letter. I’m glad you are getting along passably well.

We had a good two weeks in Amherst, Mass, just in time to get the new leaves and loveliness of spring there. It came early this year.

Crellie is getting along well. Did you receive your copy of the Festschrift? Do you like it? Everyone seems pleased.

Thank you for your expression of my usefulness which came at a good time for I have felt uprooted and purposeless here. But I must get cracking soon. I have felt all right and have had no further symptoms of there being anything wrong with me.

Perhaps I’ll come and see you sometime this summer. Or are you coming here? I have a hi-fi set here now which I purchased through Linie. He ordered it for me. 40% off. I don’t have many records yet.

[...] Sandy is going to have pups again. Poor Linda! She managed finally to get rid of all the first ones.

My Christmas cactus is at it again - blooming that is! And is covered with lovely blossoms. I think it means to recompense me for the lack of a garden! Nice thought.

Our Santa Barbara friends, the students, spent last weekend with us. They go to India, Kashmir, on the 22nd. I think all around the world.

Best love to you and to the children. Keep well. The times are horrible here in the U. S. and I’m sure they will get much worse. This beautiful world and this wonderful country. One could cry,

Hugs + kisses, Mama

May 6, 1968

Mrs. Orvil Bolduan

4813 45th Street NW

Washington, D. C. 20016

Dear Mrs. Bolduan:

I thank you for writing to me about my paper on Orthomolecular Psychiatry. I am pleased to have been able to read your letter. The questions that you raise are difficult ones, and I hesitate to attempt to answer them.

I thank you also for sending me your poem Orthomolecular Psyche.

Sincerely yours,

Linus Pauling

LP:jj

P.S. I am sending you some publications under separate cover.

Monday-

Dear Peter:

Thank you very much for looking for Hayes’ book for me. I am glad to hear that a new edition is in the works; it is a bit out of date, but even so remains the text of choice.

[...]

Papa came here to give a lecture a few weeks ago-a lecture as part of the University's Centennial celebration. I was stuck with the task of introducing him, a kind of thankless job, I'm afraid. I managed, but now my image about the campus is somewhat shifted. I have been struggling to gain my own identity, and introducing Pa before all my students doesn’t help any. I think that my relationship with both Ma and Pa is improving, though. Pa seems to me to be much more open to an adult, but emotional, interaction than he has ever been before; of course, it may be that I am getting better at handling such an interaction. I ring him up at the lab every week or two, and he usually talks a good deal. Mama, too, seems to be more open than she has been. I think (I really mean that I feel) that only recently do either of them view me as a reasonable human being, with ideas that warrant consideration, and so on. This feeling is one that I have gotten only in the past year or two. Clearly it was absent a couple of years ago when it might have helped me.

I’m very pleased that your x-ray work is going well. My work, too, has been going very well the past few months. I now, for the first time in my career, feel that I am working on something that is my own, and feel really in the forefront of research in my field, I have a paper in press, in the PNAS, the work for which has all been done in the past three months. In addition, experiments that we have underway are very promising, and will be very exciting, if they hold up. So maybe I can make it after all! I find that a degree of satisfaction with my work does wonders for my self-esteem. In turn, this new self-confidence does wonders for my general outlook on life, and for my relationships with people generally.

I got a promotion, to Assistant Professor, step III. It means $600. That helps, too.

By the way, I think that there is an opening for an x-ray man in Featherstone’s department at the medical school in San Francisco. That is Department of Pharmacology, University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco. The man they had left. The medical school looks very nice; situated overlooking Golden Gate Park and the Golden Gate. Pharmacology is on something like the 11th floor, so the view is magnificent. Anyway, SF is Mecca, as far as I’m concerned. It would mean either living in a flat, or commuting from the suburbs.

Love-

Crellin

May 7, 1968

Dr. Linus Pauling, Jr.

3909 Round Top Drive

Honolulu, Hawaii 96822

Dear Linus:

I enclose a copy of a letter from Dr. Walter Alvarez. He mentions in the last sentence that you were very kind to him when he visited Hawaii a few years ago.

I was pleased that he should write to me about my paper. I remember seeing a column by him, a year or two ago, in which he mentioned Dr. Hoffer and his use of niacin in treating schizophrenia.

I also enclose a copy of the New York Times article. Dr. Seymour Kety has in the past been an opponent of megavitamin therapy. Only two years ago he was still expressing opposition to it. Perhaps he is changing his mind, now. I noticed that the National Institute of Mental Health has embarked on a rather large-scale project of testing it out.

Mama and I had a good time on our trip to the University of Massachusetts, which is in Amherst. We are going to Santa Barbara and Pasadena now (also a dinner by the Center in Los Angeles), and then on 23 May we are going to Putney, Vermont, where I am to give a commencement address at a college. We return on 27 May.

I have written to Anita, without getting a reply. I used the address "Aroda", 1222 Vesenaz, Geneva. If this is not the right address, please me know.

Also, let us know if you are planning to visit us this summer. We are going to the ranch about the middle of June, and expect to be there most of the time until the first of October.

Much love from,

Daddy

LP:jj

10 May, 1968

Dear Papa:

Enclosed is my manuscript "Properties of a Temperature-Sensitive Radiation-Sensitive Mutant of Escherichia coli" for transmission to the Proceedings. I have incorporated your comments, and a few others made by my colleagues. I think it is not a bad little paper.

I enclose the original, with a set of photographs. In addition, I am sending a copy, in which the photographs are copied as well. If this isn't satisfactory, let me know. I would suggest that the Materials and Methods section should be set in small type; perhaps that is automatic.

Thank you very much.

Much love

Crellin

May 13, 1968

Dear Mrs. Hull:

I thank you for writing to me about my article Orthomolecular Psychiatry.

I am sending you a copy of the article under separate cover.

I think that it is likely that part of the cause of poor health of people nowadays is the contamination of the environment by insecticides and other toxic chemical substances. Some fertilizers are, I believe, not in this category; for example, ammonia, ammonium nitrate, calcium phosphate, and some other substances are normal constituents of the environment, and can be effective even though they have been made in chemical plants from other substances.

A main point of my paper is that a diet that would ordinarily be considered to be a satisfactory one may still not contain the optimum amounts of various vital substances, such as the vitamins that I mentioned in my paper, and that for some people an improvement in mental health could be achieved by providing much larger amounts of these vitamins than are ordinarily recommended.

Sincerely,

Linus Pauling

LP:jj

16 May 1968

Linus Pauling, Ph.D.

P. 0. Box 109

La Jolla, California 92037

Dear Pop:

I enclose some material Gregory Bateson asked me to forward to you.

That is a somewhat sardonic letter-to-the-Editors in the current Time magazine (10 May) - I had to laugh!

I hope all is going well with you, and especially that you're not exhausting yourself travelling around.

Much love,

Linus

LP:s

Enclosure

18 May 1968

Dear Pop,

Just a note to let you know that I discovered that the writer of the letter to the editor of TIME magazine (17 May 1968) (I think I erred in saying it was 10 May in my last note) was a patient of mine here back in 1963 when she was a grad student at the East-West Center in philosophy. That helps explain her reaction, and sometime when we get together I can tell you more about it perhaps. It is an interesting story.

Much love,

Linus

May 20, 1968

Professor and Mrs. Albert Tyler

Division of Biology

California Institute of Technology

Pasadena, California 91109

Dear Albert and Betty:

On page 13 you refer to early presentations of template concepts in synthesis, and refer to a couple of my papers and to the 1940 paper by Delbrück and me. I would be interested to know what you have found during your search of the literature as to the early published suggestion that the gene may consist of complementary molecules, each of which would act as a template for the synthesis of a duplicate of the other, in the process of gene duplication. A few years ago I saw a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in which the author said that Watson and Crick had developed a completely new idea, in their paper on the double helix, the idea that the gene could consist of two complementary molecules, each of which could act as a template for the synthesis of a duplicate of the other. I wrote to him, sending him some of my papers in which this idea is mentioned, the first of which is, I think, the 1940 paper by Delbrück and me. He did not answer my letter. I am not sure, in fact, that our 1940 paper was the first one to make this suggestion. What have you discovered, in your search of the literature?

There is a statement on page 15 that is wrong. You say that Watson and Crick assumed pairing of purines and pyrimidines with hydrogen bonds joining A to T and G to C in the manner illustrated in your Fig. 4. In fact, they assumed hydrogen bonds joining G and C in a different way, with only two hydrogen bonds. Even some years later (Scientific American article) the incorrect structure with only two hydrogen bonds was being used by at least one of them. It was Corey and I who pointed out that the known structures of purines and pyrmidines require that there be three hydrogen bonds between G and C, as illustrated in your Fig. 4, and everybody has accepted this structure. I tried to get Crick to explain to me why they refused to accept three hydrogen bonds for the GC pair. He made a statement—something about acid-base properties of DNA, as shown by titration curve but it seemed to me not to be of much weight. In my Centennial Lecture at UCLA a few days ago I mentioned this episode, as showing that it is possible to make an important discovery even if some of your ideas are wrong.

I am sending you a copy of the volume Structural Chemistry and Molecular Biology, under separate cover.

Sincerely,

Linus

LP:jj

P.S. The paper by Delbrück and me is No. 31, listed on page 901 of the Festschrift. The paper about three hydrogen bonds between guanine and cytosine is No. 285, listed on page 902.

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

May 23, 1968

Professor Crellin Pauling

Department of Biology

University of California, Riverside

Riverside, California

Dear Crellie:

Under separate cover I am sending you a book on Bound Water in Biological Integrity. On page 91 there is some reference to thiamine. You may have this book, or give it to the library; I don't think that I have any more use for it, after having looked at it.

Love from,

Daddy

LP:jj

Science in Relation to the Humanities

Commencement Address, Windham College, Putney Vermont. (Pres. Eugene Winslow)

26 May 1968 (Charles Coryell is Trustee)

Linus Pauling

Science consists of our knowledge about the world, our effort to understand the world. The Humanities comprise our knowledge of man in relation to the world, our effort to understand man himself.

I might draw the conclusion that the Humanities constitute a part of Science. I think that this statement is only partially right.

Bertrand Russell has said that Philosophy consists of thinking about, speculating about, those aspects of the world about which we have not yet acquired knowledge; when we acquire knowledge about it that part of the world becomes included in Science, and the philosophers move on to other matters.

From this point of view I would say that the Humanities lie partially in Science and partially in Philosophy.

Also, we see what is wrong with Philosophy, as it is usually taught. It is behind the times - Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, Locke - their old speculations about some aspects of the world are so lacking in interest, in comparison with our present knowledge, that they are out of place now, except in a specialized course on the history of philosophy. Other aspects of the older philosophy (Henry Sidgwick, John Stuart Mill, etc.), especially dealing with ethics and values, are still full of life and interest.

I think that Science should be considered one of the Humanities - or the other way around. The separation between the two causes a great many people to be unhappy - to get less happiness out of life than they should. You young people especially - I hope that you are not woefully ignorant about a great part of the world. C.P. Snow in The Two Cultures said that scientists know something about the Humanities, but the Humanities often know nothing about Science, are really ignorant persons.

The satisfaction of one's intellectual curiosity can be a great source of happiness.

I hope that all of you young people can read the Scientific American with some understanding.

To know some mathematics helps. If you don't you have to rely too much on others.

Example now PULSARS.

The HUMAN BODY. Genetic. Dot on forehead. Sickle-cell hemoglobin. Hb Human, Gorilla etc.

The MIND and the BRAIN. Ephemeral memory. Permanent memory.

Korsakow's disease; inhibition of protein synthesis.

Science & Ethics. Principle of minimization of suffering.

WAR. U.S. 6% of population > 60% ownership.

3/4 of Vietnam = 22,000,000 people, $120/year average = $2,600,000,000 x3 = $8 Billion value of all property. (factor 4.7 for U.S. 3 for undeveloped countries) $100 Billion costs to U.S.

We destroyed $300,000,000 worth of N. Vietnam property at a cost of $900,000,000 in our planes alone shot down. WHAT SORT OF BUSINESS is this?

We are trying to stop the REVOLUTION of the miserably poor, the starving, the economically exploited people of the world, by use of our military might.

We say that we want to make the world FREE. Our greatest violation of freedom is the draft - we force young men to be murderers in an unjust cause.

In U.S. there is great injustice. Top 5% to 600,000. Bottom 5% to 40,000,000. 70 to 1 ratio.

In World 3.3 billion people live on $200 Billion/year, 10% of world's income. $90/year average vs. $270,000. 1 to 300.

Militarism costs > $200 Billion/year!

WHY DON'T WE USE SOME OF OUR WEALTH FOR THE BENEFIT OF MANKIND?

I have confidence in you young people, who are revolting against the greed, the hypocrisy, the immorality of your elders. Apply method of science - discover the facts, be Humanists - concerned. I believe in justice, in morality; I believe that all men are created equal, that they are endowed

May 29, 1968

Cable to Peter Pauling

University College, London England

Decided against reviewing Double Helix.

Love

Daddy

May 31, 1968

Mr. Joseph A. Stirt

310 DeNeve Circle

Los Angeles, Calif. 90024

Dear Mr. Stirt:

I have been interested to read your letter.

Your ideas about the nature of the mind are, I would say, related to Bohr's ideas about complementariness.

I myself think that it is likely that we shall develop, as the years go by, a more and more detailed understanding of the nature of the mind in relation to the structure of the brain.

I enclose my 1961 paper on Anesthesia, in which I discuss the electric oscillations of the brain as constituting consciousness and emphemerai memory, and molecular patterns constituting permanent memory.

Sincerely yours,

Linus Pauling

LP:jj