Interview with William Lipscomb. November 3, 1991. Interview by Thomas Hager for use in "Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling,"
(Simon & Schuster, 1995).
Pauling's Major Contribution to Enzyme Studies (1:16)
William Lipscomb: Most of us, while we were at Caltech in the forties, felt that Linus was going to
get a Nobel Prize. We didn't know what for, but he could of got it for a number of
reasons. One of the reasons that he did, right about that time, was the idea that
enzymes are selected or generated by nature to bind the transition state of the reaction,
the substrates. And he wrote a letter to me some time ago about just that discovery,
and said that he had tried to get Carl Niemann to make a transition state analogue
for chymotrypsin, the enzyme chymotrypsin. Carl never did, but he had the idea; he
published it in a couple places. That idea has been a very, very important thing in
biochemistry. He could've got the prize for that, you see. And for the molecular diseases,
for all kinds of things that he could've gotten it for, but other people if they had
done just that, might have qualified.
Clip
Creator: Thomas Hager, William Lipscomb Associated: Linus Pauling, Carl G. Niemann Clip ID: hager2.002.6-nobel
