AIR MAIL
Balliol College;
Oxford, England
Feb. 3, 1948
Dr. Robert B. Corey
Crellin Laboratory
California Institute of Technology
Pasadena 4, California
Dear Bob:
I hope very much that you are getting along well, and are using good judgement about going back to work. It would be much
better for you to stay an extra couple of months at home now than to get up prematurely and have to go back to bed again later
on.
I haven't seen very much of the crystallographers here so for—having been kept very busy with everything else. I have, however,
seen a lot of Dorothy Hodgkin. Also a young fellow named Poiser came from London the other day to talk to me about working
in America for awhile—he has been in charge of the cement project in Bernal's research institute. I doubt that there is anything
that we would want to do for him. However, he did make an interesting statement, that he was associated with Bunn in the fly's
-eye investigation of penicillin, and is very optimistic about this method. He said that it would be possible to try, say,
fifty or sixty proposed structures for an organic compound of moderate complexity in a reasonable length of time—that the
intensity comparison could be made for a structure with a total outlay of time of about two hours for one man. This would
mean that perhaps two or three weeks would be required to try the fifty or sixty structures. His enthusiasm is so great that
I think that it would be desirable to have Jerry or someone else look into the fly's-eye method, to see whether or not we
should adopt it. It might be very helpful with the amino acids and simple peptides.
Dr. Corey
Feb. 3, 1948
Also I saw Perutz for an hour a couple of days ago—he was up on a visit from Cambridge. He said that one of the men there
has got very interesting results with myoglobin. Its molecular weight is, of course, only 17,000, and the crystal contains
two of these molecules in the monoclinic unit, with a two-fold screw axis. The unit is 30 Å. along the b axis, and about 65
Å. On each of the other two axes, with a 73 angle between them. He describes the molecule as a pancake 65 Å. In diameter and
15 Å. Thick, and says that the data (Patterson) show that there is a single polypeptide chain, folded presumably into an alpha-carotid
fold, and then zig-zagging back and forth in the plans to give the pancake molecule. Also the optical date show that the one
heme group is perpendicular to the plane—that is, the plane of the heme group is parallel to the b axis, and presumably this
group is attached to the pancake at one edge.
All of this suggests to me that we should get some full-time post-doctorate man at work gathering data for crystalline proteins.
Will you see what can be done about this?
With best regards, to Mrs. Corey also, I am
Sincerely yours,
Linus Pauling:par
