9 November 1955

Dear Peter:

I am not sure how much chance there is for you to get a postdoctoral research fellowship. It happens rather often that a man who holds a pre-doctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation is also awarded a postdoctoral fellowship, for study in Europe, but I do not know what they would think about a man who had already been in Europe for four years. At any rate, there is no harm in trying - why don't you popooff an application to NSF for a postdoctoral fellowship. I think that if Kendrew supports the application reasonably strongly, and if seems important for you to continue with him for another year, you would have some chance.

Why don't you try to squeeze some information out of Joe Kraut about the group that is supporting him. I don't know about the Florida group, but I might be able to find out if I had a little lead. Perhaps it would be better for you to work for a year in some other place in Europe, but I am not sure where you would want to go. Theorell's laboratory is a possibility, and you might be able to make up an argument about combining structural Information (x-ray data) with magnetic properties. Very little work has been done on the magnetic properties of myoglobin. You might look up a paper on magnetic properties of myoglobin, published from our laboratories. It is in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, along about 1938, by a fellow named Taylor, I think, who was a graduate student here. The principal papers on hemoglobin are Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 22,159, 210 (1936), J.A.C.S., 59, 635 (1937), J. Phys. Chem., 43, 825 (1939), J. Biol. Chem., 132. 769 (1940). I think that there would be considerably better chance of getting the NSF postdoctoral if you were to move to another country than if you were to stay with Kendrew. Theorell has developed magnetic techniques very greatly, in connection with his work on magnetic properties of cytochrome-c. He started out by coming to Pasadena for a summer, and working with our apparatus, which he then improved in his design.

There has been some paramagnetic resonance work done on hemoglobin, and perhaps on myoglobin, recently. I have seen a letter in Nature, I think, a few weeks back. There seems to be a dependence of the g factor upon the orientation of the heme group. This might be made into a valuable way of getting information about the orientation of the heme groups in a crystal of unknown structure, probably more sensitive than the dichroiam method.

I shall look forward to seeing W. C. Mixon when he comes to Redlands. I know about the Kirkpatrick work - Kirkpatrick was a student of Du Mond's some 25 years ago. As to our collagen structure, some optical diffraction patterns have already been made, by Baer. They come out reasonably well -not perfect but close enough to make the configuration a possible one.

I went to Washington, D.C. and Detroit on a six-day trip test week. We had a symposition in Washington (Office of Naval Research) on molecular structure and biological specificity. I was chairman. In Detroit I attended one day of an international sympositum on enzymes, and then gave an address in the evening, the Edsel B. Ford Lecture, on the future of enzyme chemistry.

Sanger is here - he gave the chemistry seminar yesterday. He said that he brought your regards. He seems not to know Linda, although he said that he had seen her about.

I am not sure that I have told you about the program of research that I hope to set out on, dealing with mental deficiency. I think that it may well be that most cases of mental deficiency have a biochemical abnormality as their basis. I have been in correspondence with Haldane about this.

Mama and I are going to drive up to Berkeley in a couple of weeks, in order that I may attend a conference arranged by the Office of Naval Research, dealing with work in biophysics in the western United States. We are getting along well, except for Jeff. When we got back from our eastern trip three veeks ago we found Jeff in the hospital, and operated on for a broken leg. He had had a leg that bothered him for some time, and Mama had taken him to the hospital to have it looked over about two months ago. He seems to have injured it again while we were away. Now he has a pin in his right shoulder, and he uses his right foreleg hardly at all. We are hoping that he will improve, as time goes by, and will have some use from the leg.

Corey and I have been talking a great deal about possibility in determining the structure of crystals of globular proteins.

Love from

[Linus Pauling]

9 November 1955

Dear Daddy,

I enclose your current account. The book shop occasionally forgets to send the penguins. I can find no record of a subscription to the Faraday Society for 1955. Perhaps you have let it drop. You were not at home in January when it probably came up.

How about getting Holmes to make another Rotating Anode, smaller, faster, so a precession camera will go on it. There is a firm which makes a recording deusitometer for single crystal photographs that have straight layer lines that is quite good for about $2000.

I am considering working on x-ray diffraction of bacterial flagella or electron microscopy of viruses, and virus degredation products. Perhaps I should go on to simpler rather than more complicated problems.

Much love,

Peter