November 13, 1950
Mr. Sidney Weinbaum
PMB 21593
Steilacoom, Washington
Dear Sidney:
I have just returned from an eastern trip, during which I talked before some sections
of the Chemical Institute of Canada, and also attended the meeting of the American
Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.
I have been pleased to learn from Lena that you are getting along all right. If there
is something that I can do for you, please let me know.
Dr. Corey and I have prepared and sent off to the Journal of the American Chemical
Society a brief note on the different structures that we have found for the folded
polypeptide chain, compatible with the structural information available. Dr. Corey
is not continuing work on the comparison of predicted distribution functions and those
reported for hemoglobin by Perutz. We are changing the calculations that you made
of the radical distribution functions by including also a carbon atom of each side
chain. The position of this carbon atom can be predicted without difficulty. There
is, rather, one difficulty – we do not know whether the spiral is a right handed or
a left handed spiral, relative to the left handed configuration of the amino acid
residues, and so there are two possible sets of positions for the side chain carbon
atoms.
I don't know whether you had heard that Mr. Bergman had had to go to the hospital
for an operation over a month. He had had one of his ureters clogged up by a kidney
stone, causing hydronephrosis. An operation was performed to see just what was wrong
and to remove the stone. Then, after he came back from the hospital, he continued
to get worse, and finally had to go again for a second operation, which seems to have
been successful.
He and David Shoemaker succeeded in determining the structure of the sigma alloys.
They found that these alloys have a tetragonal structure, with 30 atoms in the unit
call. It is a very interesting structure, which can be described as obtained from
hexagonal closest packing, through a distortion and rotation of alternate layers through
90º.
Sincerely yours.
Linus Pauling
P.S. I hope that you will write to me sometime.
P.P.S. I have just learned that Bob Smith has continued to have trouble and has
had to withdraw from the Institute because of his health.
