August 5, 1968

Professor Jerry Donahue

Department of Chemistry

University of Pennsylvania

Philadelphia, Pa.

Dear Jerry:

I was pleased to read your recent contribution to Field theory.

I think that there is the possibility that your paper should be submitted to Science, because so many people are interested in DNA. You should, however, include a statement as to what you think about Watson-Crick pairing. In your final section you make it clear that you do not think that the Fourier evidence provides verification of the structure. I suppose that you think that the Watson-Crick structure has a high probability of being correct. Whatever your feeling is on this point, you should, I believe, make a statement about it, in this paper.

If you do submit it to Science, you should, I think, revise it to make it somewhat more interesting to the general reader. You might, for example, include a drawing of the molecule in beta selenium, as reported by Burbank, and the molecule as we found it. Also, you could point out that the structure was reinvestigated by us because the Burbank molecule made such poor sense from the standpoint of chemical bonding. You probably could introduce some additional discussion, along these lines, for the other cases that you treat.

In many places in the manuscript I have changed the verb "was" to "is". For example, in the sentence beginning on page 2, paragraph 5, you have written "It was later discovered that the correct structure was disordered". Presumably you believe that the structure is disordered. I think that, in such a case, you should write "It was later discovered that the correct structure is dis-ordered." This error appears in two other places on the same page.

Sometimes I use an infinitive, writing, for example, "The structure was first thought to be ordered, but it was later discovered that it is disordered."

Together with one of my students, I am writing a paper now on the compressibility of selenium.

By the way, how is your book on the structure of the elements coming along? I want to get out a fourth edition of The Nature of the Chemical Bond, and I should like very much to have your book at hand while I am preparing this edition.

Cordially,

Linus Pauling

P.S. I don't think that you should try to make your book perfect. It is better to have an imper- fect book published that a perfect one in a drawer in your desk, not yet perfected.