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Hitchcock Foundation Lectures: "Chemical Bonds in Biology" January 17, 1983. University of California, Berkeley. The Nature of Hemoglobin. (1:44)

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Linus Pauling: The red protein in the blood, hemoglobin, has interested me for a long time, has a beautiful color. When I was a young graduate student beginning, I saw in the chemical library at the California Institute of Technology, some big green volumes which I looked at through curiosity. They were by, I'm not quite sure, Brown and Schuckert or something like that. These investigators had collected blood from a lot of different animals. They separated the red corpuscles and hemolyzed them and let the hemoglobin crystallize and then took photographs of these hemoglobin crystals. And the crystals all looked different, from one animal species to another animal species. Each animal species manufactures its own kind. Human beings manufacture human hemoglobin, fetal humans manufacture fetal hemoglobin, which is more like fetal calf hemoglobin, say, than adult human hemoglobin -- the fetuses of the world are more closely related to one another in some way than they are to the adults of their own species. And of course, now we know that about three-hundred different kinds of human hemoglobins are manufactured by adult human beings. So that's another example of biological specificity.

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Date: January 17, 1983
Genre: sound
ID: 1983v.1
Copyright: More Information

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