19 February 1959

Professor Konrad Bloch

Professor Paul Doty

Professor Frank Westheimer

Chemistry Department

Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Dear Professors Bloch, Doty, and Westheimer:

I am pleased to reply to your telegram, asking my opinion of Francis Crick.

I think that Crick is a very clever and intelligent man—the sort of man who should be a professor.

He has a good knowledge of the field of x-ray crystallography. I don't know how much he knows about biochemistry.

Some of his work has been brilliant. Much of it has been done with collaborators, and it might be hard to decide how great the contribution is that Crick made in this collaborative work. However, I have little doubt that he has provided a good bit of the brilliance in the collaborative work.

Crick has an interesting personality. I judge that he did not get along very well with Professor Sir Lawrence Bragg. I think that, on the other hand, he does get along well with most people.

It is not easy to compare Crick with other people in the same general field. I think that he knows much more about x-ray crystallography than Alex Rich does, and that he probably is a more original man. He is not so sound and thorough as Professor Robert B. Corey, my collaborator, but on the other hand he is more imaginative and, of course, much younger. He probably has greater originality than David Harker, although I think that David Harker knows much more about structural chemistry than Crick does. Harker has done some fine jobs in the field of x-ray crystallography, such as his determination, with two students, of the structure of decaborane. Harker's work on the structure of proteins has, however, been disappointing.

I may say that if I were looking for another man to carry on work on the determination of the structure of crystalline globular proteins (that is, if Professor Corey were not doing this work in our laboratory) I probably would have a strong inclination to appoint Dr. Murray Vernon King, who is one of Harker's collaborators, and who has been, I think, in large part responsible for the progress that has been made on that project. King, who received his training with Lipscomb, impresses me as being an able and original man who gets things done.

Crick probably has broader interests, so far as biochemistry goes, than Kendry, who is, of course, making good progress in his attack on the structure of myoglobin.

I would expect Crick to be an interesting and effective lecturer.

Sincerely yours,

Linus Pauling:jh

19 February 1959

Professor J. L. Hoard

Chemistry Department

Cornell University

Ithaca, New York

Dear Lynn:

I have just been reading, for the second time, your paper on tetragonal boron, and I am writing primarily to tell you my opinion of it. I think that it is one of the best crystal-structure determinations that has ever been made. Also, I am pleased with the excellent writing in this paper. Too often scientific papers are written in a discouragingly dull way.

I have decided to discuss the structure, in the new edition of The Nature of the Chemical Bond that I am writing, by saying that there are per unit eight bonds with bond number 3/4, and 140 bonds with bond number approximately l/2. I take as the average values reported by you (or, rather, calculated from what you report) 1.62 +-0.02 for the three-quarters bonds and 1.797 +-0.015 for the half bonds. The values that I calculate as expected are 1.695 Å and 1.80 Å, respectively.

I hope to have the manuscript finished by 1 April 1959. If you have results for your rhombohedral form by that time, you might be willing to give them to me, so that I could refer to them. Also, if you hear that those other fellows have refined the small-unit rhombohedral structure, let me know. Perhaps you would pass on to me whatever new and unpublished structural information you have, so that I can consider whether it needs to be mentioned in the book.

Ava Helen and I are looking forward to seeing you in October. I am going to give the Messenger Lectures, and we are to spend the first two weeks of the month in Ithaca, staying at the Telluride House.

Sincerely yours,

Linus Pauling:jh

P.S. I calculated the value 1.62 by giving one-third weight to the plate value.

L.P

Western Union

B CAB107 PD AR=WUX CAMBRIDGE MASS 19 312PME=

=DR LINUS PAULING, DEPT OF CHEMISTRY=

CALIF INST OF TECHNOLOGY PASADENA CALIF=

POSSIBILITY HAS ARISEN THAT THE CHEMISTRY DEPARTMENT MAY HAVE A BIO-CHEMICAL PROFESSORSHIP FOR WHICH FRANCIS CRICK WOULD BE A CANDIDATE. COULD YOU PLEASE WRITE US WITHIN A FEW DAYS YOUR EVALUATION OF HIM, COMPARING HIM WITH OTHER POSSIBLE CANDIDATES. YOUR VIEWS WILL BE MOST VALUABLE FOR US AND OUR COLLEAGUES=

PROFESSORS BLOCK DOTY AND WESTHEIMER HARVARD UNIV CHEMISTRY DEPT=