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Letter from Linus Pauling to George Burch. May 10, 1949.
Pauling writes to request that Dr. Burch send him large quantities of sickle cell
blood for use in research at Caltech. Pauling further describes the current status
of his group's research on sickle cell anemia, on both the theoretical and the experimental
levels.
Transcript
May 10, 1049
Dr. George Burch
Tulane University
Medical School
New Orleans, Louisiana
Dear Dr. Burch:
We have now got to the stage in our work of sickle cell anemia when it is important
that we have a large supply of blood from sickle cell anemia patients, and we have
not succeeded in making any satisfactory arrangements to collect this blood locally.
I am writing to ask if you could help us with this problem.
Our program is moving along very well. We have found that the disease is due to the
presence in the erythrocytes of a form of hemoglobin differing from normal adult human
hemoglobin. The hemoglobin seems to contain approximately four additional acidic groups
per molecule, or else it has approximately four basic groups missing. We want now
to carry out analyses of the hemoglobin, in order to find exactly what the difference
in the hemoglobin is. For this purpose we would like to have in the immediate future
about one liter of hemoglobin from sickle cell anemia patients (not sickle cell trait),
in addition to what we can obtain locally. Do you think that it would be possible
for you to obtain this blood for us and to ship it to us, without too much trouble
to yourself? We could pay for the special expenses involved from our Public Health
Service grant in aid. The samples of blood from different patients should not be
mixed, in order that we could test them individually to see whether they are sickle
cell anemia samples or not. We have found that the hemoglobin from patients with
sickle cell anemia is 100% of the abnormal kind, whereas that in the erythrocytes
of sickle cell trait individuals is a mixture of sickle cell and normal hemoglobin.
The tests of the hemoglobin are made with the Tiselius apparatus.
With best regards, I am,
Sincerely yours,
Linus Pauling:shh
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