7 February 1956

Dear Peter:

Best wishes for a happy Birthday. Mama and I hope that everything is going well with you, and that you consider the coming year, after it is over, to have been the best in your life so far.

We are looking forward to seeing you before long. I hope that you will come home this summer, to visit us. Perhaps we shall see you in Europe. I have been invited by the Minister of Rational Education of the Republic of France (actually by the Director of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) to come to France, but he hasn't said when, and I am writing to find out if the month of June would be acceptable to him. I don't know when the vacation comes in France. Also, I have been invited to give the Avogadro commemoration address in Rome, where they are going to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the death of Avogadro, so that perhaps Mama and I will pop down to Italy for a while. The invitation didn't say when this celebration was to be held, and I have written to find out. I am afraid that if we accept these invitations I shall have to give up the idea of getting out a new edition of The Nature of the Chemical Bond this year. Perhaps we can come home in July, and I can settle down to work on the job then.

I don't want to spend too much time away from the laboratory now, because I want to get the attack on crystalline globular proteins well under way, without delay. I am getting more and more confident in our ability to solve this problem. I haven't heard from Dintzis yet. I am not at all sure that he will be useful in our attack on the problem - we don't need somebody with experience in making chemical modifications of proteins, because that is not a part of our scheme. Instead, we need somebody who is experienced in taking x-ray photographs of crystalline proteins. Very little work along these lines has been done here. If you have any other suggestions to make, about getting somebody who would help with this part of the job (perhaps also with instrumentation), please let me know. We already have two people at work growing crystals, and I think that we shall get a couple of others. The attack that we have planned involves a lot of hard work.

Did you know that Barclay Kamb has been doing some x-ray work this year? He is in his last year as a graduate student in geology, but he has a chemistry pre-doctoral fellowship - the Corning Glass Fellowship - and he is working under my general supervision, on the redetermination of the structure of zunyite, which I had investigated, in a rather superficial way, over 20 years age. Barclay has already done about as good a job on zunyite as has ever been done on a silicate mineral. He has been appointed Assistant Professor of Geology here. He will be in charge of field work in geology - the summer camps - and he plans to continue x-ray research on silicates. He is no longer engaged to the girl whom we visited in Germany.

Mama is in good shape. She puts in about a day a week working with the Quakers, and also some time working with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

Love from

[Linus Pauling]