Interview with Linus Pauling. August 21, 1991. Interview by Thomas Hager for use in "Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling,"
(Simon & Schuster, 1995).
Pauling's Earliest Interests in Molecular Biology. (5:12)
Linus Pauling: Theodore W. Richards was the first American chemist to get the Nobel Prize, he was
a professor at Harvard. And he died in 1928. So his professorship was offered to G.N.
Lewis who turned it down, and to Tolman who turned it down, and then to me in 1925.
So I went back to Harvard for a week and stayed with Conant in the President's house
- well he was the Head of the Chemistry Department at Harvard then. Wasn't President
yet. I stayed with him for a week. At that time he was doing some work as an organic
chemist on hemoglobin and on hemocyan, a copper compound, a copper protein. He showed
me around his laboratory. I stayed there for a week at Harvard then turned the job
down. He showed me around the laboratory. By the way, they offered an Associate Professorship.
When I turned it down it was changed to Full Professorship, which I didn't accept
either.
So Conant showed me some spectrophotometric, some absorption spectra of hemoglobin.
And I said if you were to cool hemoglobin to liquid air temperatures, to liquid hydrogen
temperatures, you would get sharper absorption lines. And I was interested in what
he was doing. I knew, I think, at that time that he had discussed the acid-base properties
of hemoglobin. He may not have published his discussion. It was published later -
I quoted it in my papers with Coryell - in which he talked about the acid groups in
the globin of hemoglobin and identified two different acid groups as present in the
side chains of histidine in the globin. Well, this shows that in 1929 I had an interest
in hemoglobin and hemocyanin. In the early 1930s Coryell and I were carrying out some
studies, never published, also on hemocyanin.
And so I can - it's not surprising that as a chemist of wide interest, I was interested
quite early in these biological substances. So that was about the time that Morgan
and his people came to the Institute, and I became interested also in genetics. So
I don't think that Warren Weaver was responsible for getting me interested in hemoglobin
or in proteins. But he was, in a sense, responsible for my deciding to carry out some
experiments on the magnetic properties of hemoglobin because of his suggestion that
the Rockefeller Foundation was interested in this field which I also was interested
in.
Clip
Creator: Thomas Hager, Linus Pauling Associated: G.N. Lewis, Theodore W. Richards, Richard C. Tolman, James B. Conant, Charles Coryell,
Thomas Hunt Morgan, Warren Weaver Clip ID: hager2.006.2-earlyinterest
