William Castle: Happily enough I was part of a committee, which Dr. Pauling was a member, and this was the committee that gave some of the
information to Vannevar Bush for the eventual appearance of the book referred to yesterday by Dr. Knowles, of Science the Endless Frontier. We traveled about the country, we had very pleasant one night stands, on the whole, here and there, and we had, we discussed
scientific matters in general and sometimes in particular.
It was 1946, I think, that we were coming, Dr. Pauling and I, on the train from Denver to Chicago. And I was very much interested
in talking with him because I knew of his interest in the relations of antigens to antibodies that just had been referred
to by Dr. Morell, and I was getting a great deal of exciting information from Dr. Pauling. And then I mentioned a couple of
things about sickle cell disease, but mainly the fact that Dr. Sherman, who was working in Baltimore, in Windtropes Laboratory,
had observed that when the cells of this disease were sickled, they showed under the polarizing microscope birefringence and
suggested the possibility that this meant molecular orientation and that might then mean, explain why the cells were, as it
were, oriented in one direction rather than spheroidal.
And I didn’t even appreciate, at that time, that this was the hemoglobin. This has been overstated a bit, although the Hahn-Gillespie
paper was clearly there. I am very confident that I did not imply anything more in the discussion with Dr. Pauling than this,
I thought, was the kind of thing in which he was interested and that there was molecular orientation.
Audience Question: Had Harris produced tactoids then?
William Castle: No, no, no, this had not been done. And that did not come until 1950, which was the year after the Itano-Pauling paper. So
I think at this point, having a historical relevant, I should turn the floor over to Dr. Pauling because this was our last
contribution to the great things that happened thereafter.
