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"The Life and the Structure of Hemoglobin."

"The Life and the Structure of Hemoglobin." 1976.
Produced by the American Institute of Physics.

Magnetic Testing of Hemoglobin with Charles Coryell. (1:52)


Transcript

Linus Pauling: It occurred to me that the same magnetic methods that we had been using to study simple compounds of iron, in order to determine the bond type, could be used to study the hemoglobin molecule. One of my students, Charles Coryell, and I, then got some blood, cattle blood, and put it into an apparatus. It consisted of a balance, which we had fitted out in such a way that a wire was suspended from one arm of the balance through a hole in the base of the cabinet, and held a tube. This tube was placed between the poles of an electromagnet. We filled it with blood, oxygenated blood, and balanced it to measure its weight. Then we passed an electric current through the coils of wire and the apparent weight changed.

It turned out that the blood was being repelled from the magnet. When we removed the oxygen molecules from the blood to get venous blood, the sort that flows through the veins in the body after it has given up the oxygen in the tissues, then we found that the blood was attracted by the magnet, attracted into the magnetic field. The iron atom had changed the nature of its bonds with the surrounding atoms. This led to an understanding of the nature of the structure of hemoglobin in the immediate neighborhood of each of the four iron atoms.

Clip

Creator: Linus Pauling
Associated: Charles Coryell
Clip ID: 1976v.7-magnetism

Full Work

Creator: American Institute of Physics
Associated: Linus Pauling, John Hopfield

Date: 1976
Genre: video
ID: 1976v.7
Copyright: More Information

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