THE FUTURE OF STRUCTURAL CHEMISTRY

By Linus Pauling

Lecture at John Winthrop House, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The structural chemist of the past and present has been an architect working with materials of whose nature he is largely ignorant - an architect who does not know what an I beam is, but only that it can be used in his construction, and who must proceed to design structure after structure, to find ultimately that certain designs lead to satisfactory results - to a building with roms adapted to the use of certain visitors, to bridges strong enough to hold their load, and so on. the structural chemist of the future will be able to plan his structures and forecast their properties in the same definite way that the architect and engineer plan the macroscopic, even Gargantuan, structures of civilization.

To make the situation definite, let us consider a molecule such as phosgene. The older chemist wrote COCl₂; we now write [drawing of COCl₂ with bond angles], and each number has significance. Or consider a zeolite - an aluminosilicate such as permutite for water softening. We now know its structure completely - the rooms for Na⁺ or Fe⁺⁺ or Ca⁺⁺, the corridors through which they run, etc.

In the near future we can hope to have detailed information about hundreds of molecules. El. diff. method.

Diaspore - struts of H-bonds.

Lepidocrocite

(Importance of H bonds)

Hemoglobin.

Future - I predict that the major advances in chemistry will be correlated with structural ideas in the same way that the advances of chemistry in the past involved valence theory.