Cavendish Laboratory
Cambridge.
13th June, 1951.
Dear Pauling,
Thank you very much for your letter about Dunitz who was a candidate for our I.C.I.
Fellowship. He was also a candidate at Oxford and as he was successful there he withdrew
from our list.
We have been tremendously interested in your broadside of papers on protein structures.
Your solution of the c-keratin chain carries conviction. It fits in so beautifully
with many facts. I think we were led astray in our review of chains by a feature
of the Patterson projection which originates from something else than the chain structure.
A spiral pattern has always appealed to me much more strongly. The Astbury chain
always seemed such a very artificial one for so universal and fundamental a structure.
I do congratulate you most warmly on what I feel is a very real and vital advance
towards the understanding of proteins.
The group here has got a fourier solution of the haemoglobin structure which looks
good to me. It is only at the stage of an assignment of the positions of the rods
in the molecule; the resolution is not sufficient to define the structure of the rods.
Still, it is a step in the right direction. A report of it will be given at the Stockholm
Conference, I wish you were going to be there.
With my warmest regards to your wife and our former guest Crellin.
Yours very sincerely,
Professor L. Pauling
Gates and Grellin Laboratories of Chemistry, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena,
4, U.S.A.
