"So much good work has come from the Medical Research Council unit in Cambridge under Perutz and Kendrew that I think it deserves the recognition of a Nobel Prize. I have drafted a form of recommendation and I am enclosing the draft for your comments. I need hardly say how much strength would be lent to it if you felt able to give your support. The two main things are the body of work by Perutz and Kendrew which may now be fairly claimed to have succeeded in getting out the structure of two protein molecules, and incidentally shows how large a part of your d helix plays in it; and in the second place there is the work on nucleic acid by Watson and Crick. Each of these, it seems to me, is of Nobel Prize standard. One must also take into consideration a number of other important contributions from the laboratory, such as the work on virus, on sickle-cell anaemia, the beginning of Huxley's work on muscle, and the work on collagen; it is an impressive record. As an alternative I thought it might be well to suggest that the work of the unit as a whole should be recognized by dividing a prize between its four leaders, Perutz, Kendrew, Watson and Crick. Here I should be especially glad to have your views."
W.L. Bragg. Letter from Sir Lawrence Bragg to Linus Pauling. December 9, 1959.

"I might say that it reached a very pleasant climax at a conference that Linus Pauling had arranged to take place in Pasadena in 1953. Nowadays we would call it a workshop, on the structure of biologically important molecules: it probably wasn't attended by more than 25 or 30 people...The conference was strictly limited to structure; but in that respect, it was quite spectacular. It included Watson and Crick's account of the structure of DNA, solved six months earlier..."
Max Perutz. Interview with Horace Freeland Judson December 1970.

"Pauling's textbook on the chemical bond changed the way scientists thought about chemistry, presenting chemistry as a disciplinary field unified by an underlying theory. By demonstrating how the characteristics of the chemical bond determined the structure of molecules and how the structure of molecules determined their properties, Pauling showed for the first time, as Max Perutz said, 'that chemistry could be understood rather than being memorized.'"
Mary Jo Nye. "Was Linus Pauling a Revolutionary Chemist?" Bulletin for the History of Chemistry, 25: 76-77. 2000.

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