=REC’D MAY 23 1963
HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL – DEPARTMENT OF MEDICINE
BOSTON CITY HOSPITAL
HARVARD MEDICAL UNIT
THORNDIKE MEMORIAL LABORATORY AND
SECOND AND FOURTH MEDICAL SERVICES
May 22, 1963
Dr. Linus Pauling
California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, California
Dear Linus:
By chance someone drew my attention to a news release for the morning papers as of Friday, May 10 from the University
News Office at the Medical School. It concerned the prospective publication by Vallee and Wacker, J.A.M.A. 184: 485-489 (May
11), 1963 and had been seen neither by me nor the authors of that article entitled “Medical Biology: A Perspective”. In the
news release, the statement was made “Knowledge of these investigations led Dr. William B. Castle of Harvard to suggest to
Dr. Linus Pauling of the California Institute of Technology that sickle cell hemoglobin might have an amino acid composition
different from that of normal adult hemoglobin.” Apparently the text of Dr. Vallee’s article was innocently misinterpreted
through the understandable technical ignorance of the lay author of the publicity release. Although this detail of the text
of the release may never appear in the press, should some newspaper have printed it, I wanted to let you know that neither
the authors of the article nor I were aware that such a misrepresentation of the facts had been made.
Last January 16, while Dr. Vallee was preparing a lecture in which he wished to refer to my connection with subsequent
investigations of sickle cell hemoglobin, I wrote him a letter stating my recollection of the circumstances of our conversation
as follows:
“What I do remember clearly was a conversation with Dr. Pauling on a railroad train while traveling from Denver to Chicago
subsequent to this meeting. (? 1946) Knowing of Paulings work on protein structure, I pointed out to him the possible significance
of the characteristic deformity of the red cells in sickle cell disease, associated, according to Sherman, with the appearance
of birefringence. I suggested that I thought that this would be a matter of interest to him because to me the phenomenon of
birefringence suggested the occurrence of molecular orientation in the reduced state of these cells.
“As in his Harvey lecture, Pauling has been very gracious on other occasions in referring to me at all because the essential
observations indicating the presence of an abnormal hemoglobin with respect to its physical behavior on deoxygenation were
clearly stated by Hahn and Gillespie in 1927. Sherman’s observation was made in 1940, and Ponder in 1948 had demonstrated
that osmotically produced “ghosts” deprived of hemoglobin would not assume the sickle shape upon exposure to low
Dr. Linus Pauling -2- May 22, 1963
oxygen tension. Indeed, he proposed that the intracellular hemoglobin molecules, when deoxygenated, assumed a “para-crystalline”
arrangement. The work of these authors is duly cited by Pauling in his lecture.”
I know that you are much more interested in the future of biology than in the past but I would be distressed if the garbled
account in the news release should actually appear and come to your attention without this explanation.
With kind personal regards,
Sincerely yours,
W.B. Castle, M.D.
