29th October, 1969

Professor Linus Pauling

Chemistry Department

Stanford University

Stanford, Calif. 94305

U. S. A.

Dear Pa,

Would you please give me some advice on the strategy of publication? I am writing some papers on the conformations of nicotinic and muscarinic agonists of the nervous system. In each case there is a group of structures which have been analyzed by ourselves and others which correlate to say something about the relevant conformation, and also a group of structures which I think I can predict on the basis of conformational correlations of various groups in known crystal structures. Would it be better to write one long paper on nicotinic agonists, for example, in which I include both the known crystal structures and the predicted ones, or should I write two papers for PNAS - one on the known crystal structures and the other on my predicted structures? At the moment I am proceeding on the basis of writing papers short enough to get into PNAS but this means that there will probably be four such papers coming along. The papers on the correlation of observed cholinergic molecules would be with other authors, but I think I would write the papers with the predicted structures by myself.

I am going to try to get my papers on observed preferred conformations of organic groups published in the Journal of the Chemical Society, Section B or D, but if they won’t publish them I will send them to you for advice. I want to publish these comments on observed preferred conformations so that I can refer to them while discussing conformations of molecules with unknown structures, without repeating the entire arguments repeatedly.

(I think we will put observed muscarinic agonists in science.)

Work is going very well here. We are analyzing a crystal structure approximately every three weeks and sending notes on most of them to Chemical Communications. I think I shall apply for the Chair in Physical Chemistry at Bedford College. I probably will not get it and am not sure I want it, but it won’t do any harm to apply I think.

Much love,

Peter

The Dictionary should have arrived complete by now. P.