"[Pauling] had already proved himself in the early years to have such an ingrown sense of the realities of the quantum as applied to chemistry that he did not need to think about detailed derivations but thought automatically in quantum terms."

J. D. Bernal. "The Pattern of Linus Pauling's Work in Relation to Molecular Biology." Structural Chemistry and Molecular Biology: A Volume Dedicated to Linus Pauling By His Students, Colleagues and Friends (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman). 1968.

"It can be said that, by and large, Pauling's idea played an essential role in the working out of protein structure. But it did far more. It broke away from the limitation imposed by crystallographers on the integral nature of the turns of a helix. It eventually led to a new generalization of crystallography that was to have immense repercussions. It might be said, 'Only a crystallographer could have predicted this development, but if they were good crystallographers, they would have been bound to reject it.' Indeed, Pauling's generalization opened the field to a new and much more wide-sweeping account of semiregular structures that are similar to the helical."

J. D. Bernal. "The Pattern of Linus Pauling's Work in Relation to Molecular Biology." Structural Chemistry and Molecular Biology: A Volume Dedicated to Linus Pauling By His Students, Colleagues and Friends (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman). 1968.