20 May 1954

Dear Peter:

I was pleased to see your letter, containing your ideas about introducing mercury into insulin. I agree that this would be a good thing to try. I am not at all sure that it is a good problem for a doctoral research. In any case, if you wanted to go ahead you would have to check with Dorothy.

Mama and I made a trip to Deep Springs last weekend. It is an interesting place, but I think that the fifteen boys who are there might get rather lonesome during the long winter. We also stopped at China Lake; I gave a talk on hemoglobin before the chapter of [unreadable].

I am going to give the Commencement address at Reed, and we shall accordingly have to leave Pasadena about 8 June. We plan to drive then from Portland to Toronto, where I am to speak to the Chemical Institute of Canada, and then to New Hampshire, and then home, arriving home about the Fourth of July. Linda has said that she wants to make the trip with us, but I am not sure that she will. I think it likely that she will be turning up in Cambridge sometime in August.

I have received a form from the Secretary of the Board of Research Studies, issued 1 May 1954. It is not for me to fill out, but seems to have been sent to me for my information. Possibly it was sent to me just because I have an honorary degree from Cambridge. I note that a supervision fee of 5 pounds is to be paid each term to every supervisor for each registered research student working in Cambridge under his supervision. It mentions that some supervisors have returned the money to the research student, and the board deprecates this practice. Have you been making your payments regularly? I also note that the Board of Research Studies may remove from the register the name of a research student about whom they receive an unfavorable report.

Corey and Marsh are just finishing the manuscript on the structure of silk. I think that there is no doubt that silk has a pleated-sheet structure. Agreement between observed and calculated intensities is pretty good.

I have made a comparison of radial distribution functions calculated for the new collagen structure and the observed radial distribution function. The correlation of the two is not good enough to prove the structure, nor poor enough to show it to be wrong.

Love from

[Linus Pauling]

P.S. I think I ought to have a copy of Lipson and Cochran, The Determination of Crystal Structures. Would you buy a copy for me. You do not need to send it to me now -- send it in a few months, after you have used it, and add the cost of it on to the bill for books that you will send me later on.