8 October 1954

Dear Linus and Anita:

I am writing to give you news - not very much because not too much has happened.

First, Crellin seems to have had a fine time in Honolulu. He was with us only three or four days - Mama got him some new clothes, and we saw him off to Reed. I judge that he is getting along well there. He may not like to be in a place where it rains so much. I got tired of Portland when I was a boy.

I had a letter from Mrs. Bilger, explaining why she had had some trouble with Crellin because he insisted on parking in the places reserved for faculty members. I judge that she was afraid that he might tell me a one-sided story. She also said that she regretted the new regulation that kept her from continuing as chairman of the chemistry department, but that she and Earl were looking forward to taking a trip around the world.

Mama and I, by the way, are not goint [sic] to take our trip around the world this year. I have just had a letter from the State Department saying that they will not validate my passport for the trip. I have written the State Department that I have cancelled the trip, and am going to make plans for a trip from December 1955 to April 1956. The temper of the times seems to me not to be such as to make it worth while to try to appeal the decision.

I have, by the way, been invited to come to South Africa for a month or six weeks in the spring of 1956. Even if we do not make the trip around the world, we may go to South Africa, assuming that the passport will be validated.

Mama and I are going to Princeton next month. On 1 November we shall fly to New York and take the night train to Ithaca, staying two days - I shall give a talk there. Than we shall go to Princeton, for a couple of weeks. I am to give the Vanuxem Lectures there. President Dodds wrote that these lectures are the most important public lectures that Princeton University holds. I am planning to talk on molecular structure and biology - the molecular structure of biological molecules. Four lectures are to be given, and I have scheduled them for four successive days, toward the end of our stay. We are also planning to attend the meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, and I am going to give a Sigma Xi lecture in Philadelphia and an American Chemical Society lecture in New York.

I have been working hard on the preparation of a second edition of COLLEGE CHEMISTRY, all summer. Mr. Freeman thinks that if the job is well done, so that the book is more easily used by ordinary college students, the sales should be doubled. I have rewritten almost completely the first seven chapters, and have revised other chapters pretty extensively. Today I have been correcting proof of an article that is to appear in the American Scientist. I am feeling pretty mad right now, because I have had to make 100 changes in the proof - changing back a hundred changes that had been made by some editorial assistant in my manuscript. I remember that I had published one paper in the American Scientist before, several years ago, and that I was irritated then because changes were made in my manuscript. They were not so many as this time. In this case it was particularly bad of the editor to change the manuscript, because the same article is being published elsewhere, in a book, and I think that it would be funny if it appeared in two different forms. It is the speech that I gave at the opening session of the 13th International Congress of Pure and Applied Chemistry, in Stockholm, in July 1953. The opening session was held in the Concert House in Stockholm, and was attended by about 2500 people. It was quite an affair.

Our house has been full of people today. Mama had the plumber here, repairing some faucets, and also a couple of men sanding and waxing the floor in the living room and study. She is getting ready for our Divisional tea, to be held on 23 October. We are going to have the chemistry picnic party on 30 October and on the afternoon of the same day we shall have a cocktail party for Bill Freeman and his wife.

We had a visitor a couple of weeks ago from Turkey - Professor Serdaroglu. He and his wife are hoping to arrange to translate GENERAL CHEMISTRY into Turkish, but I judge that he wants to get Mr. Freeman to agree to allow them to do it without paying royalties, on the grounds that the Turkish sales would be small anyway. Last summer the arrangement was made for GENERAL CHEMISTRY to be translated into German - we had luncheon with the director of a publishing firm, Chemie Verlag, and discussed the matter with him, in Ludwigshafen, perhaps in Heidelberg (I think we had dinner with him in Heidelberg, and lunch in another city, whose name has slipped my mind now). Last week a young man came in, from Göttingen, the man who is making the German translation. He is staying here a few days.

We have had several Japanese professors as visitors during the last two weeks, also. One of them is Professor Mizushima, who had tried to bring us some tussah silk worms when he came from Japan in June. Tussah silk worms are the wild silk worms - Corey and I had wanted to get some of them to compare them with Bombex mori. When Professor Mizushima arrived in Honolulu his package of silk worms was taken from him and dumped into the incinerator. I had not known that it would be necessary to get a permit before having them brought in. We have now arranged with Professor Mizushima to have one of his assistants get some tussah silk worms, extract the silk gland, and stretch it and roll it, and then to send us the samples of silk fibroin.

I am on the Scientific Advisory Board of Massachusetts General Hospital again, and am planning to go to Boston on the 9th and 10th of December. I am to stop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on the way, and in Dallas, Texas, on the way back, each time to give a speech at a fund-raising dinner of the American Friends of the Weizmann Institute. I shall also go to Tucson the end of November, in order that I may speak there at a similar dinner.

I remember that Crellin seemed disturbed, when he came home, by Jim's visit. In particular, he asked me if Mama had invited Jim to stay with you. I told him that the only thing that Mama had done was to answer some question that Jim asked her, as to whether you had really invited him. She said that she was sure that Crellin would not have invited him to come to stay with you without having had your permission. Also, Mama and I had thought that Jim was going to visit you for only a few days, and we were surprised when, at the last moment, he said, over the telephone, that he was planning to stay for several weeks. I had a little talk with Crellin about inviting guests to stay in other people's houses: I said to him that we had had trouble in recent years with our children, who seemed to think that they were free to invite guests to come to Pasadena, and to stay with us. Crellin apparently was rather angry with Jim; he refused to talk with him over the telephone, when Jim phoned, and then, when he did talk, he was very curt with him. We have not seen Jim since his return from Honolulu.

We have had a fence built along the north side of our property, and for 200 feet down the west side. It is a 5-foot grapestake fence, and it was built by Jack Benke and some of his friends. We paid Jack the standard rate, $2.25 per linear foot, but he did not do a very good job, and we are rather dissatisfied. He had never built a fence before, but we had thought that his experience with wood working would permit him to do a satisfactory job.

We have been swimming nearly every day in the swimming pool, but it has been a bit cold the last few days, and we have not used it.

I have a couple of men working with me on hemoglobin problems now. One of them is Dr. Allen Lein, who is Associate Professor of Physiology in the Medical School of Northwestern University. He is working on myoglobin, studying in particular the combination of myoglobin with the alkyl isocyanides, in order to determine whether or not the heme group is buried within the globin. The other is a post-doctoral research fellow, Dr. Murayama, who was a friend of Dr. Itano in the University of California. Dr. Marayama is making careful measurements of the equilibrium constants with the alkyl isocyanides of normal human hemoglobin and some of abnormal hemoglobins. Today he got a sample of blood from a patient with thalassemia major. There is some question as to whether thalassemia is a disease involving an abnormal hemoglobin or not. The evidence seems to be against it, so far, but I have been hoping that this tentative conclusion is wrong.

During the summer a young man from Oxford stayed here, Dr. Anthony Allison. He is a medical man, in the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. His home is in Kenya, East Africa. He carried out a striking experiment last year. He injected 30 adult male Africans, in good health, with malaria parasites, and watched to see whether they would develop malaria or not. Of 15 normal individuals, 14 developed malaria, whereas of 15 sicklers (carriers of sickle cell anemia), only 2 developed malaria. He concluded that the abnormal hemoglobin present to the extent of about 40 percent in the blood of the sicklers protects them against malaria, and that this is the reason that the sickle-cell gene has continued to exist, despite the lethal character of the homozygous state.

Pasadena people have been somewhat upset by an accident a few days ago. You may remember Rudy Caspers' son, Ronny Caspers -- I think that he was a classmate of Peter. Rudy Caspers had a 75-foot yacht, and Ronny Caspers was piloting it from Santa Barbara to Newport, a few nights ago, when he collided with a Coast Guard cutter. The yacht sank, and two of the five people aboard were drowned, including his wife. Ronny is about 23 years old, and his wife was 22 years old -- I don't know what her maiden name was.

Professor Buwalda died a couple of months ago.

Beadle and Mrs. Beadle are coming up to see us tonight. Mama is going to give Beadle a batch of our iris bulbs. She has been thinning them out.

I am continuing to work on the problem of the structure of collagen, whenever I can get time from the job of writing COLLEGE CHEMISTRY.

Much love from

[Linus Pauling]

Linus Pauling:W