Letters to Peter

“You know how children are threatened ‘You had better be good or the bad ogre will come get you.’ Well, for more than a year, Francis and others have been saying to the nucleic acid people at King’s ‘You had better work hard or Pauling will get interested in nucleic acids.’” -Peter Pauling. Letter to [...]

Chargaff’s Rules

“We have created a mechanism that makes it practically impossible for a real genius to appear. In my own field the biochemist Fritz Lipmann or the much-maligned Linus Pauling were very talented people. But generally, geniuses everywhere seem to have died out by 1914. Today, most are mediocrities blown up by the winds of the [...]

The X-Ray Crystallography that Propelled the Race for DNA: Astbury’s Pictures vs. Franklin’s Photo 51

During their so-called race to discover the structure of DNA, Linus Pauling and the unlikely pair of James Watson and Francis Crick utilized remarkably similar approaches in attempting to solve the riddle of the genetic material. In fact, one of the main tactics used by Watson and Crick was to approach the problem in the [...]

The Watson and Crick Structure of DNA

Today, our series on models of DNA is concluded with a discussion of the correct structure determined by James Watson and Francis Crick. Although they made an unlikely pair, the two men succeeded where one of the era’s leading scientists – Linus Pauling – failed, and in the process they unraveled the secrets of what [...]

The Pauling-Corey Structure of DNA

Today, the structure of DNA series is continued with the model proposed by Linus Pauling and Robert Corey in 1953. As a result of insufficient data and an overloaded research schedule, Pauling’s structure turned out to be incorrect. However, it is interesting to see the ways in which one of the world’s leading scientists went [...]

The Fraser Structure of DNA

Today, the DNA series is continued with a post discussing a mostly correct structure that almost emerged from King’s College in the early 1950s. Although Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, and Bruce Fraser each contributed information for the structure, it was Fraser that actually put the pieces together and built a model. Therefore, today’s post will [...]

Creating The Pauling Catalogue: More than One-Thousand Illustrations

[Part 5 of 9] The Pauling Catalogue contains over 1,200 illustrations in its 1,700+ pages of text. The long process underlying the selection of these images was based upon two fundamental guiding principles. First, it was the goal of the editorial team that The Pauling Catalogue be used to display certain of the more important [...]