July 29, 1938
Dear Warren:
I wish to thank you for letting me know about the expected visit of Professor L. Zechmeister
to this country. I am writing to him to find out if he expects to come to the Pacific
Coast. Mr. Shaffer’s preliminary results on the application of the chromatographic
method to amino acid separation are promising, and we are hoping that we can develop
the method satisfactorily and apply it extensively.
You may be interested to hear about our plans for work during the coming year in the
crystal structure field. The complete structure determination which Dr. Corey has
made on diketopiperazine is the first made for any substance closely related to protein
---- all of the earlier work on amino acids and such compounds has been incomplete
and has led to no definite results regarding interatomic distances and molecular configurations.
Dr. Corey and Mr. Albrecht are just finishing a complete structure determination of
glycine. During the coming year, there able men, Dr. Corey, Dr. E. W. Hughes, and
Dr. Henri Levy, are going to determine accurately the structures of as many amino
acids and related substances including some with peptide bonds, as possible, in order
to give us reliable information regarding the stereochemistry of molecules related
to the proteins. In addition we are planning to begin x-ray work on some of the proteins
themselves. I feel that the proteins are too complex to offer great promise that their
x-ray investigation will lead to significant results beyond those already obtained
by Astbury, but the protein problem is such an important one that it seems desirable
to attack it, in the hope that something worthwhile will be discovered.
Dr. Niemann will be here in a few days now, and I am looking forward to rapid progress
in organic research here after his arrival. Dr. E. R. Buchman has come to pay an important
part in the activities of the Chemistry Division, and I feel that he, too, will be
a very valuable man in the development of organic chemistry here.
Sincerely yours,
Linus Pauling
